Apartments of Friends, 2005

In 2005 I was commissioned by Ymere, the Anne Frank House and Stichting Vluchtstad Amsterdam to produce a photographic series for The Other House of Anne Frank, a publication accompanying the restoration of the apartment where the Frank family lived from 1933 until 1942, before going into hiding.

The apartment had remained in domestic use after the Second World War. In 2003, archival research was undertaken to reconstruct its pre-war appearance. After the restoration, the apartment was made available to Stichting Vluchtstad Amsterdam, an organization that offered temporary accommodation to writers and artists who had been forced to leave their countries.

My contribution developed into two related groups of photographs. One was made in the reconstructed Frank family apartment. The other consisted of interiors of apartments belonging to immigrant friends living in Amsterdam.

I became interested in the very different ways in which these interiors carried ideas of home, memory and displacement. The Anne Frank apartment was being carefully returned to an earlier historical state. Objects, surfaces and architectural details were reconstructed in order to evoke a home that no longer existed. In the apartments of my friends, by contrast, home was not being reconstructed historically but produced continuously through everyday life.

While photographing these spaces, I began to notice recurring tendencies in the ways people inhabited them. Some interiors were kept deliberately provisional, containing little beyond what was necessary for daily life. Others accumulated objects, photographs and decorations that maintained a connection with a previous home or cultural environment. In still others, the arrangement of the interior seemed directed toward an imagined future — a home not only as a place of residence, but as a projection of stability, aspiration or belonging.

I do not see these as fixed categories. They overlap, and the same interior can contain several of them at once. What interested me was how ordinary objects could acquire particular weight after migration: furniture, photographs, souvenirs, fabrics or decorative arrangements could become ways of negotiating the distance between a previous life, the present situation and an anticipated future.

The two parts of the project therefore approach displacement from different directions. One interior had become a historical monument, reconstructed through archives and preserved as part of collective memory. The others were private spaces shaped by people whose relationship to home was still unsettled and evolving.

For me, the project was not about comparing different histories of migration. It was about the vulnerability of the condition itself: the attempt to establish continuity after displacement, and the role that domestic space can play in making an unfamiliar place temporarily, or gradually, one's own.