MARILIA DESTOT :: PHOTOGRAPHY

In my new work Memoryscapes, I revisit my photography archives and use orphan images taken around the world, along the years. I print, tear and recombine them: mysterious seascapes or mountain tops, hand-collaged together. Playing with the patterns, the color palette, the shapes, the crease of the tears, I experiment intuitively, randomly with the fragmented, abstracted, minimalist elements. I create layers of space and time, layers of memory. I transform organic landscapes into imagined ones, akin to the way storytellers borrow from their memory to weave new narratives.

Those Memoryscapes shift from poetic and calm to ominous and turbulent. They are echoes of my fragile inner self and of our scattered Nature. I remember those places I photographed, but I know their memory and integrity have already been or will be altered over time. A treasure and a loss at once, I intend and desire to retain as much as to reinvent them. Those imaginary landscapes become my imaginary travels, my escape, my quest for a soothing beauty, my poetic archaeology of what remains.