My brother Fred had a museum of skulls and bones when he was still in elementary school. It was called Skadot - a name I created out of the first names of the small group of kids who were his helpers. As all our first names started with consonants, I chose the last letter of each - and the name Skadot really stuck, with its close resemblance to the word 'skelèt' - Papiamentu for skeleton.
The museum moved with us, when we moved to a new house in the suburbs, and my father and brother's workshop where it was housed, is still referred to as "Skadot" even though the bone collection no longer exists.
Our father. Frank Mendes Chumaceiro, even made a film about Skadot, showing all of us looking for bones in the mondi, the island's thorny wilderness, where goats, dogs, and iguanas lived and died. And he filmed my brother working in his museum, building little stands to exhibit his finds.
People started to bring him skulls and bones, and soon we learned to identify the animal they belonged to, and where each bone fit in that animal's body. His most precious possession was the skull of a dolphin - and visitors could never guess which animal it came from, usually guessing something birdlike, because of its long snout that suggested a beak - but birds do not have teeth, we would say. And besides, it would be too heavy to fly.
And so I too developed an affinity for bones - fascinated by their shape and function in the body - never associating them with anything grim and mournful, perhaps already accepting death as a natural part of life.
Continuing my attraction to the spaces inside the skulls and bones, I have my own collection, that started when my daughter Inbal, at age 12 or 13 brought me the intact skull of a bull - a beast with its horn - that she carried all the way back to the bus from a hike with her nature club in the hills around Safed. I still have that skull, that became a favorite subject of my drawing and painting - especially, when I started out as an artist, inspired by the work of Georgia O'Keeffe. And the same bull's skull has served as a favorite subject for my daughter's daughter, Eden, a recent graduate of the Bezalel art academy.
And now that my medium has become photography, I have returned to my skull collection, creating a series of black and white photographs that I call Skullscapes.
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dogskull - photograph by Rita Mendes-Flohr, 2020