Antonia Gigglberger - Documentary Photographer

tina

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Tina 2022-23

I got to know Tina in North London, where she regularly visited a local Memory Café, which was part of her church. Here she was served free coffee and cake, sang songs from her childhood and solved quizzes together with much needed, dear company.

She lived a life full of wonders and said that talking helped her to disentangle her memories. Often we would go wander around London and have coffee together, trying to clarify Tina’s thoughts.

One day, we set out to seek Tina‘s childhood home. After a long time of seemingly wandering about aimlessly, we got lucky and found the house she spent the first couple of years of her life in.
A lifelong interest in all kinds of topics created a wide knowledge. Sometimes Tina would linger on a topic which she felt particularly interested in at that very moment.

“I’ve got so much material. The world of… history. Especially the world of history. The world of literature. Again, the world literature. Music. Classical music. Politics. Medicine. Look how vast medicine is. Travel! Look how vast that is.”

Then sometimes, suddenly, another thought would catch her attention, which lead her to carry on in a different direction.

“It comes from an overcrowded memory which darker side is hellish difficult to deal with. My memory still gets clogged and seized up, because it’s overloaded, I haven’t written it out of my system. As my husband said: After Korea, I wrote it out of my system.”

Tina had four children in five years and isn't in touch with any of them.

"Who would take notice of a small blind child running about with a circus? Nobody. But that was me."

"If people realized how everything is connected, they’d have a much better idea.
People don’t understand what universality comes down to.
And if they’re not taught history, history will repeat itself with desastrous results."

"Don’t anticipate when you don’t know the ground you’re on. Sometimes it’s a minefield with some people, I mean with me, I’ve lived through much, and had so much hope. That’s why I called God the Father the good God, because he’s got me through so much, since the Friday evening I was born."

"When you are born in the war, girl, you expect anything."

"I swear to God, one of my lot, or their descendants and what not, sent me that. And that’s not the only thing, you know what I was sent this morning? I used to have a fan until somebody stole it years ago. Now I’ve been sent another fan for the heat. I went out this morning earlier, and I found a fan which I took home before 9 o’clock. I was sent these socks, my feet were sunburnt as well. That’s the first time I’ve been sunburnt since 1961."

"I am very very very very curious. A cat’s curiosity is nothing on mine."

"Time goes nowhere! Time goes absolutely nowhere."