Cadavres exquis PP 2022
In the dust of the family trunks sleep treasures. When I came across an antediluvian album about to land in the trash, leafing through its somewhat moldy pages made old-fashioned portraits scroll before my eyes. The dreamy expressions of the women, the constrained poses of the children, the vague and lost gaze of the men leaving for war, everything called me towards a poetic phantasmagoria. These faces half-buried in the sands of time, hardly anyone could identify them for me. I felt the need to embroider a lacework of words around each one, to expose them and somehow save them from oblivion.
The denomination of “cadavres exquis” (exquisite corpses) came to me after having started this meticulous reconstruction of interior landscapes. It is a game invented by the surrealists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Originally it is a folded paper that we pass to mark a sentence without knowing what the different players have invented beforehand. My grandmother taught me to compose fantastic stories with her and my cousins according to this principle. Today I have recycled this concept by cutting up multiple books of poetry, taking sentences and reassembling them according to my fancy. The result is a tribute to all these influences and composes a work that is intimate and dear to me, and that I want to share.
Welcome to my photographic ossuary.
Marion Godefroid-Richert
