A photographic investigation on smells, death and memory
Mnemosis is an investigation through a collective psyche taking as a starting point a tangible place – a morgue, a place relegated to the margins of our societies where death is invisibilised – it has for object, the difficulty of sharing a common experience by definition allusive and elusive: a smell. This smell became the pretext for the creation of a dialogue, the description of a raw social reality, as well as a journey through intimate and collective memories and a questioning of witnessing today.
In Mnemosis, images are convened through language: the artist asked her interviews to describe to her the odors they were experimenting at work daily, and proposed a visual illustration of those narratives. The final object binds together three narratives moments: in the first, an interview tells by the words of the interviews, the social space of the mortuary and the vivid subjectivity through which they navigate it. The second moment, an image book, offers a visual interpretation of those descriptions: constructed as a leporello, it can be reassembled at will by the viewers, extended as one image or read as a tale. The images themselves are a mixture of personal memories from the author, images taken for the project - but never, in the mortuary - and collective images borrowed from art history and cinema. The last booklet closes the circle as the author asked spectators – unknowing of the nature of the described odor and of the interview – to try to describe what the leporello smells like.
Photo book in three parts. Two texts booklets, a photo-book leporello joined in a hand-made hard cover
Leporello: 8 prints of each 2 images, hand glued into a 672cm long leporello folded into A3. Numerical black and white print on Imbe 125g Japanese paper.
Booklet 1: 32 pages, 155 x 240 mm booklet, black and white & color (cover) printed on recycled 80g and 160g paper. Numerical print.
Booklet 2: 16 pages A3 booklet, black and white printed on recycled 80g and 160g paper. Numerical print.
Cover: hand-made book cover, three folds, 3mm grey cardcoard, 250g and 130g black paper and white ink (handdrawn).
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