2014 - 2016
Series of self-portraits, online found pictures, performance
With the support of DRAC Ile-de-France and Pavillon Blanc, Colomiers, FR

Ghosts of your Souvenir is a collection of tourist photographs from different authors but having all our systematic presence in the background in common. The project has a performative dimension - visit places of interest and stay there for several hours in order to be photographed indirectly - and a dimension of investigation: using the information of places and dates of our presence, we find afterwards among those images published online those where we appear. As part of a renewed and extended approach of photography, we operate a move in the act of self-portrait. This series does not derive from direct recordings of ourselves - we don’t push any button - but is to select, from the astronomical amount of existing documents produced by third parties, those in which we appear: vernacular self-portraits, made through the eye and the movement of another. The authors themselves are not aware of our presence when they take the picture, we represent less for them than any decorative element.
When watching this collection of images, the viewer sees at first a series of vacation pictures just as there exist already so many, with a common and familiar aesthetic, representing various famous places of the world. But in a second time, it identifies our recurring presence; although appearing in the background, our bodies then become the main subject of these photographs. They literally embody the link between these traces scattered throughout worldwide databases by people from all over the world too, and encourage us to take another look at these pictures looking banal at first glance.