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La Rencontre (The Encounter) is an artistic project born from a family gesture: the non-renewal of a funeral concession. But what could have been an administrative act became for me a tipping point, a rift through which memory, the body, and the question of intergenerational connection resurfaced.
My grandparents died in 1981. I was two years old. I didn’t know them. When I was told that their burial would be «levelled»—in other words, that the tombstone would be removed, but the bodies would remain, without name, without trace—something in me rose. It is this lack of sign, name, recognized body that triggered the project.
For the past fifteen years, my photographic practice has explored questions of disappearance, memory, presence/absence, silent transmission. But this project is moving: it becomes incarnate, physical, ritual. I decided to exhume my grandparents. This gesture, far from being purely symbolic, will also be a performative act, a way of making myself present in a moment usually hidden, reserved for professionals and procedures. I asked to go down into the pit myself, to touch this matter of the past, to do the work with my hands. This shift in role - from the photographer to the actress, from gaze to body involvement - is at the heart of the project.
The final installation — a mix of video, sound, photography and objects — will be a condensing space: a chamber of sensitive memory where mediums dialogue. It will not seek to reconstruct, but to evoke, to open a space of resonance.
The Encounter is above all this: an attempt to approach what has not been lived, to create a moment of presence in absence, to call for an impossible but necessary encounter. This project is an intimate gesture, but also a space for collective reflection on how our societies treat death, family ties, the memory of bodies. It questions the disappearance as a process, as matter, and proposes a dialogue between art and funerary gestures.