The voices of the displaced_territories_fraction_6a-b-c, each 130x90cm

The voices of the displaced_territories_fraction_11a-b-c, each 130x90cm

 

 where we’re from...Indistinct shapes and shapeless masses at first as if waking up, colored by a mixture of hope and regrets as the day becomes clearer, then fragmented, divided, unstable but finally readable.

Displaced... memory territory 

It happens that the memory is in pieces. So far away, after such long wanderings, trials, doubts and pain. The memory of places, places of « before ». The migrant exists from before the trauma of exile, rupture and oblivion. Memories forgotten, dreaded and desired as a condition of marching forward. Memory filters the territory of origins, deforms it, idealises it or curses it. All that remains for the migrant is often the effort of memory for feeling human. As if grasping on to faded memories, the image appears like indistinct forms and formless masses at first as one awakens, coloured by a mixture of hope and regrets as the day becomes clearer, fragmented, divided, unstable but finally readable when the body is functioning at its full. An image like a mirage, and which relieves, which reassures not to be real, to be only an image without future. Territories, Others, « similars » condemned to be only images. The reality of the migrant, like his body, is forever fragmented by the fear of forgetting, by the hope of a return. The memories of the migrant are not souvenirs, they are solely the condition of being and of existing, they alone make it possible to blur, to soften the fracture of displacement. Displacement, here, is not a movement, it is not “going forward”, does not open onto any exotic encounters, it is a wound, at best like a scar.

the voices of the displaced_fragmented bodies

 

the Voices of displaced_EXODUS, each 200x200cm

 

 

the voices of the displaced_fiction, each 130x90cm

the voices of the DISPLACED, each 187x86cm

 Displaced... the fragmented souls, Introduction.

This work is a series of impressions, fleeting and sometimes oppressive… Displaced persons or migrants carry within them, whatever their age, a weight of memories, of losses and regrets, of hope too. There is the effort to keep alive where we come from as if to confirm who we are. There are the territories, these objects (the territories) become sacred with uncertain contours and which are the subject of a constant work of memory. Nothing picturesque, green and wet grass, dilapidated walls, a cluttered and sad beach, everyday life that only moves them, who are deprived of it. The displaced, generic actors in this work, cling to these memories as their reason for being, for forgetting is like disappearing. Then there are bodies whose suffering we know, fragmented as they are, as if trapped in a mistreated identity by a world they feel hostile and which only provides them with obscurity. Bodies that, like territories, must be constantly remembered. The displaced are in an intimate struggle so that nothing is erased.

This memory at work is the only subject of this series.