L’Etreinte, 2020
While sorting through my mother's belongings after her death, I came across the ephemeral, almost transparent, surprisingly fragile yet sturdy paper doilies. As I continued sorting, I found her collection of silk scarves. Like a hug from the other world, I wrapped them around my shoulders and breathed in the smell of a distant, soothing memory. I found photographs of her in a cardboard box and selected those that represented her in more or less conventional poses and also those where she seemed freer and more detached from the gaze of the camera. The slowness of drawing, in contrast to the fast practice of taking photographs, offers me a suspended time with her post mortem.
This work is not only a way for me to briefly console my sorrows over my mother's early death, but deals with the theme of the use of photography. Photography, such an accessible medium that accompanies our life stories. What do you do with all the images produced once the person who is there to tell it has disappeared? What place do they take in relation to the absence of the person represented? L'Étreinte is a proposal for post-mortem family photography.