Delhiwale: Portrait of a bedroom

Andrea Anastasio's bedroom in Delhi features black-and-white portraits of mothers in grief, including his late mother, blending art and personal loss.

The entire wall is covered with a woman’s black-and-white portraits. In each one of them, she is dressed in black, and happens to be a mother in grief.

This is Andrea Anastasio’s bedroom. (Mayank Austen Soofi)

This is Andrea Anastasio’s bedroom.

The head of the Italian Cultural Centre, Andrea lives in a central Delhi apartment. Hundreds of books fill the home. Dozens of objects—statuettes, paintings, photographs, artful lamps, some designed by Andrea himself—are arranged with the affection of someone who lives among things not as possessions but as companions. Guests to the apartment tend to wander slowly, pause, gaze, often break into small utterances of “wah wah.” But the bedroom is usually private territory. This evening, Andrea lets a visitor enter.

The dimly lit room is like a darkened shrine to the aforementioned woman in black, who appears again and again on the bedside wall. Her sorrowful photos are actually film stills from The Gospel According to St. Matthew, the 1964 Italian movie on Jesus Christ by the great Paolo Pasolini. In the film, the director had cast his own mother, Susanna, as the older Virgin Mary, Christ’s mother. The photos on the wall shows the woman’s grief-stricken face, as she mourns her son, Jesus, lying dead on the cross.

“Apart from depicting tragic moments, these photos are full of tenderness,” he says softly. The haunting portraits have been on Andrea’s bedroom wall since he moved to Delhi from hometown Rome some years ago. But the small photo-collages of flowers that appear beside many of the photographs were added last year, after the passing of Natalia—Andrea’s own mother. She too is present within the same walls.

In a corner of the bedroom, Natalia’s coloured photo stands atop a wooden chest. It was snapped five years ago in Rome by Andrea’s partner, Francesco. She was 90. “When my mother passed away,” Andrea says, “I realised that she was—and will always be—the centre of my life.”

Natalia’s photo rests right beside a stone bust of the Buddha and a wooden sculpture of the Virgin Mary. “I keep these images together because they represent many of my passions in life,” he says. “I see them as beautiful expressions of human narratives.” A few nights ago, Andrea saw his mother in a dream; she appeared in his car’s rear-view mirror. She was smiling to him.

He now opens the envelope lying on the bedside, takes out a black-and-white photo, and studies it quietly for a few moments. This is his maa as a young woman.