This work has a peculiar backstory. I purchased a batch of slides from the 1950s and 60s on the web, and from them I chose six hundred, which I then digitally cut up and reframed. But my files were lost as I was in the middle of working. Unexpected End of Files, the message that flashed up, became the title of the project. I selected fifty from the images I was able to recover. Most of them were marked by digital noise. Big streaks covered the faces and body parts of the subjects in the pictures. I saw in this effect a way of underlining the frailty of photographic images, so I began to make use of it.
Photographs are racked with instability. They fade, are lost, or wrecked by our computers. They are as fragile as our memories. My artistic practice is motivated by family photographs that have been scattered by their descendants. The transmission of a shared history is being replaced by forgetting and lost lineages. In Unexpected End of Files, sensibly seated old ladies, boys in boots, mittened children and stuffed bunnies chart the narrative path of a family reconstituted. A reinvented childhood becomes the memory-image, allowing each of us piece together our own story. And you, would you do it?
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