The anonymous album, 2006 (Indian ink on paper, 10 x 7 cm)
The reconstructed Anonymous album responds to two questions: what if we had no past and what if we had no family photo albums.
This work began with the discovery, at a flea market, of a 1970s photo album showing the main social and family events of three generations. The silhouettes of our own existence appear there. From it, I developed a series of sixteen small paintings, acrylic and Indian ink: a set of small visiting cards held between four “photo corners”, suggesting momentary and elusive breaths.
Through the selection of the photographs (their rhythm and life cycle), I froze a second time the events of anonymous lives and redrew an archetypal family. It summons common memories. These images activate a collective memory and attempt to hold on to life. Memory does not resurrect beings; it transforms them into ghosts. As an inseparable element of memory, the photograph taken out of a family album suspends time, through actions and faces, and produces portraits that now seem inaccessible to me.
After three years, during a show, the album found its original owners.