Familiarities

The empty house fascinates because the inhabitants no longer live there. Like a movement or an invitation to reconstruct the before and after, Isabelle Detournay makes possible a process of memory particularly conducive to photographic work. Layers of wallpaper of all styles, of all tastes, worn curtains, a swaying wardrobe, solitary chairs, a fly swatter, a mosquito net, and doors and windows, open, closed, which obstruct or let in an omnipresent light form this pastel decor in which a distant memory presides over the photographic moment. Thus these images where time inevitably reigns supreme unfailingly evoke a past, but also, observing the children who pass through them, a future.