In times not so long ago, we all took (made) film photos with people we loved: family, friends, loves... In the meantime, life did its work with marriages, separations, breakups, deaths. Then, one day, by chance, we came across these photos again, hidden deep in our drawers. At the sight of some, our hearts capsized at the vivid reminiscences that emerged, in bursts. For the most painful of them, we wanted to erase the still open wounds that they still caused, after so many years. We tore them up to make the emotion associated with this image disappear. Except that with film photography, there is always a trace: the negative. My idea was to erase the memory at the source, where it can disappear forever and for good, by burning these negatives. I photographed window mannequins (studio and outdoor) in the model room with 10 cm x 12 cm negatives. This unusual size helped me to precisely target the areas to burn with a lighter. As is often the case, the result turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. The negative is twisted, swollen, disturbed, close to a surrealist work of art. And the photo prints, themselves, give off a dreamlike quality that questions the eye: what do we see in these deformed shapes? What memory(s) does it evoke?
