The first gesture of this work was an act of collection. I gathered this branch in July 2024 from the garden of my paternal grandmother, Chantal, in Brittany. This gesture implies a displacement, a transport, a transplantation. Fixed and raised in concrete, this branch is neither entirely dead nor entirely alive.

Around it, fabrics bearing family photographs have been transfer-printed, hovering between appearance and disappearance. Wooden clothes pegs are thermally engraved with the first names of the women in my lineage. At its foot, a wig of black hair coiled in a kardoun — a traditional Algerian hair accessory used to protect and smooth the hair — gives an impression of presence without a body.

In Berber/Amazigh and Breton cultures, the votive tree acts as a mediator between the visible and the invisible, between humans and non-humans. One deposits something of oneself there to address a wish, a prayer. Here, the fabrics carry stories, the photographs leave the archive to be seen, and the first names layer over one another as traces of immaterial genealogies.