Memory Redux
Over several years, I found myself returning to the same places, relationships and moments through photography. Although these projects appeared unrelated at first, I eventually realized they were all part of the same search.
‘Memory Redux’ brings together these works in an exploration of memory, nostalgia and reconstruction. Through staged photography and reenactment, I revisit moments that shaped me and question how they have changed me over time.
How do I remember my childhood? I grew up in a small village called Wolfsdonk, a place you can cycle through in five minutes and already have seen completely. Wolfsdonk has about five hundred inhabitants, so most residents know one another well, at least for my family. The village consists of very little. “De Panda”, a corner shop that sells magazines, cigarettes and some sweets. I used to come here often as a child, and I remember that during the pandemic it was an eerie sight to see the shop so empty, with newspapers taped over the window. Next to the corner shop is a church, with a cemetery a bit further on, ending at the bakery. Then there was also the hairdresser and a butcher. There is not much else to see in Wolfsdonk. Or is that only how I remember the village?
Memory is selective: to remember an experience or event, we have to pay attention to it. We then rehearse it by thinking about it or talking about it. In this way, events are “encoded” and “stored” in our long-term memory. This plays an important role in my artistic practice, since my work has been built around memories. A recurring role are the events that stay with me, so I can reflect on how they were.
During the pandemic I decided to leave Brussels and stay in the village with my mother. I had just started my Photography bachelor’s in Brussels and was stuck on what I exactly wanted to photograph, since I was in a village with little to no access to creativity. And there I was, stuck until the pandemic was over.
Cycling through the village, I tried to find something that intrigued me about Wolfsdonk. I think it was the surreal aspect it gave me: when I was there, I felt as if time had stopped. Even to this day I have that feeling, as if the moment I leave Wolfsdonk, everything is put on pause until I return. I cycled past the old chapel where I used to walk by often and immediately took my tripod to make a photo. Something was missing, I did not quite know what, but I thought it was a good idea to place myself in the frame, on the abandoned bench, right in front of the chapel. I sat there for a while asking myself what I actually wanted to say. What feelings did Wolfsdonk give me? What memories did it evoke? After taking a series of photos, it was clear that I was photographing a version of myself, a version that was stuck in Wolfsdonk and had never moved to Brussels. It did not feel like a documentary, but more like a performance. I did not yet know that I was working with staging, until in the middle of the project I started involving residents of the village and placing them in a frame just like I saw them in my mind. My own version of Wolfsdonk. More and more did I get drawn into this narrative, a fictional version of the village, which grew into a fascination spanning over three years and three projects based on and around Wolfsdonk.
Everyone has some kind of relationship with the village where they grew up. For me, there was a distance, since at first only my grandparents lived in Wolfsdonk. When my parents divorced, my mother moved back into the house where she had lived as well, so my relationship with Wolfsdonk really only began when I was thirteen. It was a big adjustment, but it also felt a bit like coming home as I was there often as a child. I see the Wolfsdonk projects as one whole: a search for why I feel this way here. This feeling has never gone away with the years: there is something about the village that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Was it the time that stood still, or the silence itself? The lockdown period felt very strange, cycling through the village as if I were the last person of the town. This is how Wolfsdonk feels to me: a kind of no-man’s-land. It always felt as though I had no problems at all when I was there. A kind of refuge. I always felt the urge to keep exploring my curiosity about the village, by constantly going back and searching for memories.
Longing is a major subject in photography, and laying your personal life on the table for a project is something that happens often in every form of art. I looked up how other photographers feel about this theme and what it all means to them. Gregory Crewdson is one of them, an American photographer who creates large-scale, cinematic, psychologically charged staged scenes in suburban lanscapes and interiors. In an interview with Huck Magazine, Crewdson goes into more detailed feelings he has when staging the images from his project “Cathedral of the Pines”, where he says the following:
“I think pictures are psychologically rooted, there is a relationship between art and reality, whether you are conscious of it or not. All the locations are meaningful in my own life. Many of the subjects are people I know or love. These things are very specific yet they are not conventional documents of a place or portraits of people.” 2
I called my mother to ask what her memory of Wolfsdonk was, a completely different version from the one I had always pictured. “What Brussels is for you, Wolfsdonk is for me.” - She had built her circle of friends there in her teenage years, grew up there from the start with her parents, and developed a love for the village. "“I notice it especially when we’re together in Brussels and you walk down the street constantly running into people you know. Your friends may know me as your mother, but I don’t know them personally. It is the same for me in Wolfsdonk. Everyone knows you as my son, but no one knows you personally.” - It works the other way around for the two of us, but that is exactly what makes it so interesting.
Crewdson chooses to stage his work with people he knows well and can trust. The project is directly linked to the major changes in his personal life, with the biggest connection being the end of his marriage in a very difficult divorce, his role as a good father that he tries to maintain, leaving New York and moving to a converted church. This is where Crewdson says a collision takes place: reality ends and fiction begins. Important motifs in his work are loss, trying to make connections, exploring and longing. He himself admits that all of this comes up very unconsciously in his own work: it was only much later that he realized what “Cathedral of the Pines” was really about. 3 - A search of what home is. In the interview he also states that it is a very elusive thing and that for him it is about the whole process of making the photos and trying to find those perfect moments. A search for some form of stability, order and meaning. According to him, it lies ‘at the core of undertaking’. 4 - The photos in the project are cryptic and raise many questions about what exactly is going on. Crewdson says in an interview with John Southern that he is not very interested in what happens before or after the photo. It is a concise story that raises more questions than answers. He sees that limitation as something powerful, so that he can fully immerse himself in ‘the singular moment’ and make it as mysterious and beautiful as possible.
“For me, nostalgia is a longing for something that never was. It’s nostalgic in almost a ‘perverted’ way to heal a wound or reconnect to a moment”, says Crewdson.6
I wonder what Crewdson meant by ‘nostalgic in almost a perverted way’; does he mean that memory or events become a little distorted when you think back of them? That it feels wrong to return to these memories? Does it then create a feeling of dissatisfaction or the sense that you are not fully connected? I think so. There have definitely been moments when I was standing in my hometown and really had to rack my brain over what I actually wanted to say. The memory is in my head, yet it was so difficult to recreate those memories in the same place. Maybe because my memories are not the reality? Do I secretly just want to idealize my memories purely for the aesthetics in my work?
Two years had passed since that house party, yet it kept gnawing at me: why this situation? Was it just because of the anger I had that night? It shows that my artistic work is mainly about the rhetorical question of whether I could have done things differently in my life and what the outcome would have been. There is no answer to that, but I knew this house party was a perfect starting point for a new project to question. “IDYLL PARTIES” is a staged version of this story, where I ask myself about the staging that I apply. Is it then correct in relation to the reality I remember? Is it not just an overdramatisation of what happened, or am I leaving out large parts of the story because I would rather not remember them anymore? Is this project just the version of the party I want to remember, purely because otherwise I will keep dwelling on it? I created characters that resembled the people at the house party, gave my models those characters and transformed my apartment into a version that I could visualize enough to match the event from two years ago.
After stepping back from Wolfsdonk after the lockdown, I created my own life in Brussels. Lots of events, stories and question marks for myself. I learned to be alone (sometimes), I made new friends, fell in love and found myself as a person. But sometimes I let myself go a bit too far in this city. I am someone who can wander in their own thoughts for a long time, events that keep replaying in my head with the question of whether I made the right choices. It all sounds obvious that you can no longer change anything about it, or is there still a way? A specific house party still sticks with me.
Constructing a clear image of the memories you have is not easy. You forget some details, but you also invent unnecessary things. If I were to ask my mother how she felt in Wolfsdonk, she would tell a very different version of the village and of what her memories there are. If I asked the people at the house party how they remember the events, they would also tell a very different version. We all construct our own version of a story or event: if we both see the same moment, we will not tell the same story. I interpret it through my experiences, feelings and perspective and you through yours. That does not mean that moment did not happen, but that everyone has different feelings and different ways of remembering. Memory has a lot to do with that; it unconsciously records what happened and keeps it. I could photograph in ‘the real world’ at a real house party, but this would still feel like staging to me. Imagine that I had not decided to stage the house party in my own house, but that I went to a real house party with my camera. Would they convey the same thing? I do not think so; it would not feel like the memory I have.
The reconstruction was not simple: how do I convey a house party that I can barely remember? It has now been two years since the original event; what can you still remember of one drunk evening? Was it necessary for me to see it as a true replica? No. For me, it was enough that the emotions of that evening would come across on the images.
“I began by not photographing” says photographer Jeff Wall in an interview with SFMOMA. What he means by this is that he does not feel obliged to photograph everything he sees in reality. Instead, he lets certain moments drift into his memory. For Wall, not photographing does not mean those moments disappear; they continue to exist as memories. A good example is a scene he observed on a summer day: four people with tattoos sitting under a tree across the street. Although he did not photograph the scene at the time, he kept the memory of it. Later on he decided to reconstruct that memory artistically, with the title "“Tattoos and Shadows”. He deliberately chose to depict only three people instead of four. That decision was not about accuracy; it was about aesthetic preference. It was also a different tree from the original setting, because he felt it fit the composition better. (10) - It shows that Wall’s process is mainly about a selective reconstruction of moments from his memory, where he manipulates elements for visual impact instead of strictly sticking to reality. By not photographing everything he sees, Wall gives himself room to interpret his experiences through his art. (11)
Reconstructing or staging event is pure aesthetics: you want to convey something that gives the right feeling. Even the most romantic image in the world was staged in a certain way. Robert Doisneau’s “Le Baiser de l’hotel de Ville” is one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century, an image synonymous with love and Paris, the city of romance. The work was commissioned by Life Magazine. Doisneau preferred to use friends or young actors for his commissioned work to avoid legal problems. In an interview with the BBC, Francine Deroudile (Doisneau’s daughter) said the following:
"“His models weren’t models in the sense they didn’t pose. Doisneau was simply catching them flirting and kissing, in a very natural way.” - So the love between the models was real; it simply suited Doisneau better to photograph the lovers at the right moment, with the right feeling to trigger the viewer.
The reconstructions of the house party always began early in the morning. I taped my windows shut with black garbage bags, had loud music on and made sure my apartment became unrecognizable to myself.
That is how the staging began: it felt so real and unreal at the same time, because my sense of time was practically gone in the dark. I was surrounded by ten models, had a stylist who selected the outfits based on my story, a make-up artist who in the meantime made everyone unrecognizable, and a massive green screen in front of me. It was nothing like the original party, I had so much fun with this. I even thought it was ridiculous. During one scene, “I TOLD YOU SO”, my make-up artist Aoife helped to bring the scene across as well as possible. “How could you do this to me! Out of every person out there, why me!” echoed through my apartment whilst she tried to cry along with the model. All the models, my friends on set and I were laughing so hard at this. I almost forgot that this scene was about me.
Still, I believe that my staging in the story, the way I want it and the way I direct my models, is not the endpoint. I do not make the final call. I can explain to them as clearly as possible how I felt and how I see it, but it is up to them to express that feeling. There are hundred of versions of all the scenes we shot, because I kept photographing in the hope that what I felt, they would also feel in that split second. During the editing of the images for the project I made very specific choices: to show as little as possible. For me, it was about the essence of the characters, not necessarily the party as an environment. I wanted them to seem a bit lost, searching for something, to show the emptiness and absence to the viewer. Kind of like a black-out.
Sally Mann was one of the first photographers to consider domestic life as a subject, which she viewed from a critical standpoint. It was a commitment to capture moments in her life with her children Jessie, Virginia and Emmett. Surrounded by landscapes around their home, where Mann has doubts about the effectiveness of photography and the memories around it. She felt that the photos did not help her remember her life. She feels that photography impoverishes memories, because it transforms moments from liveliness and emotion into a static image. A lot is lost in an image, and your memory then only becomes an image, as Mann says. (13)
The smell falls away, the sounds, and the atmosphere. It will never be an identical replica of what your memory really once was. (14) - I completely agree with Sally Mann’s comments on impoverishment, because what you have in an image is never the same as in your memories. Memories are long and complicated, but in my head some things do stick. When I grew up in Wolfsdonk, one of the smells I can imagine is the smell of rain: early in the morning, when the dew is still fresh on my grandfather’s flowers. The smell of cigarettes in my freshly washed clothes because they were drying in the garage where he smoked. The smell of pinecones that were lying near the little chapel, the smell of steak already hanging in the kitchen around early afternoon. And then the transition to Brussels, where I arrived at the North Station and the only thing I could smell was pure, sour piss. The smell of coffee my friends make
