The world of everyday life, a concept developed by Schütz, goes beyond everyday reality. We often set aside our natural attitude in order to imagine fictional worlds and fantasies. We are able to transcend the everyday through symbols, alter our natural attitude and turn our attention to different spheres of reality. We sought to explore this world within this house. We wanted to feel the space, touch the walls, listen to the silence, and communicate with those who have passed through here. The ruin is our starting point. Decay inspires us and transports us to mystical realms. It makes us look at the irony of the present and turn to divine wisdom. We want to cleanse; we want to summon those bodies that have passed through here. To do this, we need to set ourselves aside, to feel nothing. To coexist and merge with one another, so that we blend together, allowing poetics to intertwine and rituals to take root.

Our test of solitude is to weave our own solitude, as in Penelope's tapestry, which stretches from the balcony to the labyrinthine streets of Arab tradition.

We proceed with the cleansing. We are a sort of Ostian shaman setting out on a journey of negotiation after inhaling toxic substances. Even Foucault succumbed to Dionysian madness on his trip to Death Valley, where, years later, the bones of Patricia – Castañeda's adopted daughter and lover – were discovered. It is not known whether this is due to the powerful spirit of datura, the devil's weed, which we see scattered throughout the city and which now invades the walls of this domestic space.

We make offerings as a remembrance of everyday tastes and flavours; we wish to commune with the gods, for they will reveal to us secrets hidden in the past. We call for the liberation of the cosmos by praying to the Virgin Mary, preserved from original sin, in the very city where this cult first began and in the country that chose her as Queen.

This spatiality in the form of a house is where energy is released and materialises in spectral apparitions. We seek our ancestral roots. Here, the visible world and the invisible world coexist.

Susana Rodrigues, 2021