Jardin secret

Working with family archives, it’s complicated. I experienced this first-hand when I wanted to make a film based on my family’s videos, exploring the various transmission processes. I loved work with these images, they are fragile and of great beauty. Faced with my family’s refusal to release the film to the public, and with the challenges of exposing an intimate family archive, I looked for a way to talk about the archive without showing the images. Using the CDs and their covers containing the original archives, I constructed a sliding puzzle to activate.

This jigsaw is about a work in progress, looking for its shape, trying to find the right combination of images and also narrative. As we try to fill in the gaps, other gaps appear elsewhere, it’s never-ending and we have to accept that it’s out of our hands. On the covers, we can read my father’s handwriting in French and Cambodian, dates, places and events.