(Work and page in progress. More texts and materials to be included soon)
6 letters. 2 photos. Those are the only documents I could tie to the mystery my grandmother, a woman I always knew as conservative and inflexible, left us when she died in 2018: the photo of an unknown military man, the fancy menu of a dinner party and a radical note, with a choice...
It said À mettre dans mon cercueil ou à brûler.
Put it in my coffin or burn it.
À mettre dans mon cercueil ou à brûler isn’t about the identity of the unknown man. It’s a puzzle left by a loved one, focusing on the family archive and all the questions unanswered. Who are the people we thought we knew?
How do we tell what’s impossible to know for certain?
How to tell what you can’t ask anymore?
With the archive, letters and photos of Gilberte, my own photos, texts, found archives and other materials, but also with care and the gaze of the present, À mettre dans mon cercueil ou à brûler is an ongoing visual and textual project about imagination and the significance of silence in women’s personal stories.