What Seasons our Days
“What Seasons Our Days” explores how food becomes a vehicle for collective memory through a series of staged portraits based on family culinary memories. These testimonies were gathered from the inhabitants of Arzon and Belle-Île-en-Mer, in the Mor Braz region of Brittany. The artist met with a wide range of generations, asking each participant a simple question: to share a memory connected to a meal. These seemingly ordinary stories, shared with modesty, form a sensitive material rooted in the intimate experience of everyday life.
The settings are drawn directly from the participants’ own environments, and the models sometimes embody themselves, sometimes a parent, a grandparent, or another family member, reenacting scenes they have lived through or heard recounted. This shift creates a dialogue between generations and gives rise to a subtle tension between past and present, lived memory and transmitted memory.
The project thus examines family, cultural, and intergenerational bonds, and the ways they are passed down through gestures, habits, and stories related to the table. The memories evoked, often modest in appearance, reveal a universal experience: that of childhood, lineage, and self-construction through what is eaten, prepared, and shared. Between past and present, memory is replayed, transformed, and circulated, building bridges across generations.
In a second layer, What Seasons Our Days reflects on the evolution of our relationship to food. From post-war meals to contemporary practices, from gestures that have disappeared to those that endure, the project highlights food as a social, cultural, and emotional marker. Here, eating is never trivial: it is a way of inhabiting the world, of positioning oneself within a shared history, and of creating connection.
Rooted in the Mor Braz territory, the project extends beyond its geographical context to touch on experiences shared by all, revealing the universal resonance of ordinary stories and everyday gestures.
