M. Maria Khatchadourian
“Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”- Roland Barthes
Decembre 2017 - i started unfolding a tin box filled with family photographs ; these photographs have become the backbone of my archive and the starting point of my collection. Images that I hope will help me reconstruct the past not like a historian but rather like a poet weaving stories, (de) constructing memories, zooming in on the details that are in the background and bringing to the foreground what is veiled, the ghostly matters within the flat surface of these images, the inter-relation between space and the person in the photograph and eventually the person looking at the photograph.
As a scenography student I am trying to find a spatial configuration that will put forward my collection of family photographs, personal objects and collected experiments.
My aim is to create an installation that is universal and inclusive from the very personal and exclusive collection, by highlighting on the fleeting emotions and memories that are embedded within the physical objects and that convey memories of family bonds, displacement, nostalgia, time passing and the inevitability of death.