Viktor Koen

“Fermoza Fading composes a pictorial timeline of memory loss, cerebral static and personal anguish. A sequence of nine prints on silk traces my mother’s progressive descent into dementia but also, our own gradual and collective loss of clarity around her image.

The series consciously began in the summer of 2023 before her unexpected passing the following spring. Experiencing her struggle to recall events or form coherent sentences pushed me to examine our family past as I imagined she was seeing it—scrambled, episodic, riddled with cognitive dead ends and frustration (this of course was a misguided notion but still, the only one I had to somehow understand what she was going through) In parallel, her condition precipitated a spasmodic effort for my brothers and me to salvage what was left of our familial archive; vanishing irreversibly since her passing to the other side.

Reflecting a range of complex emotional challenges involving moral, practical, and ethical questions, as well as guilt, these images recorded feelings too difficult to talk about. Well aware of the inevitable, we desperately tried to cope with our mother’s devolution into someone else. Fermoza doesn’t live here anymore.”