What remains when memory no longer bears a trace?

Mémoires de l'invisible : créer depuis le manque (Memories of the Invisible: Creating from Lack) is an artist's book born from this question. In the face of the silences carried by official archives, this work seeks to reactivate what has been erased, silenced or left untransmitted. From what remains, it seeks to reconstruct new narratives and imaginaries, as well as other forms of survival: through gesture, intimacy, fragment and fabulation.

Table de divinations (Divination Table) extends this research beyond the book, into the space and time of encounter. The installation rests on a tablecloth that already carries a history of its own, having hosted other collective performances around ritual sharing and bread, and on which nine objects now lie: kohl, rose of Jericho, orange blossom, foutah cloth, kesra, an egg, a sachet of herbal infusion, salt, and a blue-eye amulet. Each carries a diffuse memory, often oral and matrilineal: a domestic gesture passed down without explanation, a folk belief whose origin has been forgotten, a ritual of protection, healing or passage.

The installation borrows the ancient promise of the divination table: to read the invisible, and what cannot be said otherwise, through materials and objects.

Visitors are invited to come closer and draw a card, as one would draw an omen, without knowing in advance what will come. Each card corresponds to a text: a fragment, poem or short story weaving together history, belief, folk knowledge and fabulation. Each reading is accompanied by a gesture, smelling, eating, giving, that engages the body taking part in the neo-ritual.

Three theoretical gestures, developed throughout my research, structure the performance as a whole. Désarchivage (unarchiving) : reactivating what institutional frameworks have set aside and what official history has made invisible. Transformission : transforming in order to transmit differently, when direct transmission has been broken or never took place. Care : tending to what persists, even in fragments or uncertainty, and caring, too, for those who come to receive these fragments.

Table de divinations does not seek to fill the absence. It seeks to inhabit it, and to make absence itself a place from which to create, to remember, to come together, and to connect with what persists, despite everything, in the interstices.