the house of the seven women by Tito Mouraz

 all pictures copyright Tito Mouraz

The House of the Seven Women by Tito Mouraz is a lovely book. It's a visual story of the region around Mouraz's place of birth in Portugal told through The House of the Seven Women; seven unmarried sisters with strange mystical powers.

'On full moon nights, the women would fly in their white garments from balcony to the leafy branches of the chestnut tree across the street. From there they would seduce men who would pass by.'

The story starts with a wood shown in the daytime. It's a tranquil wood, with pine trees rising above a fern-covered floor.

Then we see a house; ramshackle, windowless, deserted. A picture of a tree comes next; isolated, sinuous and bare. There's grass; dessicated, flattened and white. We already have a picture of the world the seven women live in, the world they have created.

Interspersed throughout the book are portraits of locals, especially men. The region has been left behind, deserted both by the population and by time. There is a feeling these portraits are showing lost souls; to the seven women of the house, seven women who find a parallel in the savage economics of a rapacious world.

Destruction comes in the form of fire and from the fire comes smoke. This world is burning, there is destruction in the air. Then the nightime comes. There are ladders that reach into the sky, trees that take the form of rearing goats and stone circled firepits that speak of worlds beyond our ken.

This is an empty land with burnt out cars and unpicked fruit. The fertility that exists shrivels on the vine, the life that there is struggles to survive because there is simply nowhere else to go. It struggles and then it dies.

You can fight against the never-ending maelstrom of this 'progress'; a badly stuffed dog on a pedestal in front of your house might ward off the malevolence for a while, but in actuality only death awaits and your house will end up as empty as the rest, and the land left only for those beautiful but fleeting spirits of the night.

So there you have it, it's the House of the Seven Women, but really the seduction comes from the cheapness with which we value the world, the land, the lifestyle that came before. We don't and so it dies quite easily.

The House of the Seven Women reminds me of another favourite, The Spook Light Chronicles (which I wrote about here and here). But while The Spook Light Chronicles tells its story through the people of the Ozarks, Mouraz (through his editing) tells his story in more stark economic terms, creating a very strong and transparent narrative through evocative images.


Buy The House of the Seven Women here. 

The Spook Light. It's Spooky but is it Real?

I love the idea of the Spook Light. It's a great name for a light that mysteriously appears '...on a remote road deep in the Ozark Hills."

Spook Light Chronicles vol. 1 - the road and the light is an artist's book by Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley that examines the strange phenomenon of the Spook Light. 

The book is a mix of found, appropriated and real-life-we-photographed-this pictures. These are mixed with text that takes us somewhere into the hearts and minds of Spook Light Country. Here's the place. They have an old map and that makes it Real! And because it's real, it's even scarier.

And Spook Light Country is a scary place; it's '...an insular community living in the heart of the Bible Belt where the struggle between heaven and hell factors into everyday conversation.'

They factor into the book, because for Dolezal and Shipley "...the Spook Light has come to represent for the people we meet a desire for redemption and the fear of slipping into darkness." The  Spook Light "...provides a reprieve from ordinary life."

So Dolezal and Shipley are cranking it up, and with a name like The Spook Light, what's not to crank. The first question on my lips is "Is it real?" I really want to know this and like to believe that it is real. And Dolezal and Shipley pointing me in that direction with pictures like the one below. That has to be real.

One picture titled the boys that scared me, shows a young man standing bare-chested in the roadway.He has got two star tatoos on his chest and his hands are bunched into fists. He has a kind of smile on his face, but it's not a very nice smile and the man in the background has a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. There is tension in the air.

The caption reads:

I was kind of thinking what if the spook light were to come right here and collide with me and take my soul with it. And you guys would just have to leave me here, because I'd be a soulless man, just wandering down the road. 

There are more references to lost souls, the afterlife and it adds to the threat. The Spook Light is not benign. This is a book for suggestible people by, I'm hoping, suggestible artists. I know that if I was on the Devil's Promenade, more than a little bit of me would believe. No, let's be honest. All of me would believe. I'd be petrified with all that spookiness going on.

The found photographs build on this suggestibility and really make me believe. If it's old it must be true. The contemporary pictures of flashes of light add to this sense of threat while the lit landscapes add an alien element to the mental picture.

There are two more volumes to come in the series (the first is sold out). Hopefully by the end, I'll have the answer to my question. Is it Real?