Erna Meyer, my grand-mother, was born in 1935, in a small village, Dorlisheim in France. She never left it since. Still, she had to change her nationality three times. Not because she moved, but the border has moved around her. French, German and then French again… but what those words means, exactly? Through anecdotes and stories of the intimate and the daily life, we can grasp the abstraction of those terms and all their blurriness; the closer you come of these hermetic borders. Through HER-story, which took place somewhere inside the imperial History, it becomes clear that identities are formed by different layers which composed a body, its projections, its habits etc. A collage of memory, which take place inside us, shapes us. Fragments of stories we collected. Stories from the past, and gestures from our present in order to build our common future. These fragments can be collected in many ways: Through times, as we first only are echoes of our ancestors. Listening, absorbing, repeating. Through spaces, as we can collect fragments in geographies, we are moving through, or even the one which come to meet us. Through others, as our inner selves is a multitude formed by the voices of people around us, and the bad and good experiences we share.
Memories. Memories you inherited, or memories, you create. Memories — from different times and spaces that flows through our bodies, or our own memories that we produce, participating in the creation of the future; by passing down the past and shaping the present — are the foundation of the selves. Even much more than our nationality, origins, skin-color, gender, age… All characteristics that are usually ask to define ourselves. Memories allows us to exist as a multitude, outsides the classification of the imperial. And this essential task of transmission, care, cohesion and belonging are socially related on women. While women are weaving memories and working for the multitude and cohesion, they also have to fight for recognition and freedom in the patriarchal and colonial world that we drown in. Sometimes we also have to fight among ourselves to deconstruct these bias that are poisoning us all. The work of care was always silenced, ignored, or even taken for granted. We, women, are usually associated with the notion of care. It is even seeing as in our nature. Something natural, that we don't learn. Something that we feel. Something that we need. But actually, this is learning. Experiences we take from our mothers, they took it from their grandmothers. Knowledges that aren't in the form of a lecture, or of a lesson. Knowledges that the Imperial forces don't acknowledge as ones. Caring is also a tough work, as much important as politics and academia. Even more, because we need to heal the wound created by it. Caring is a way to receive, to offer hospitality, to offer resting, to heal, to listen, to transform, to dialogue, to give… basically to transmit all around us. It defies time and death. It defies the Archives.
In all moments of intimacy, of care, of love, of vulnerability — moments that we are socialized to associate with the feminine — is hiding a real strength. Behind closed doors, we heal the wound and ease the pain. With food, with rest, with storytelling, with sharing, with dialogues, with rituals, with home-making, with love, with care… This is where the real anonymous transmission occurs. The transmission that has no names, and is narrated in no books. The transmission of gestures, of words, of habits… Transmissions of the multitude. A Multitudes of times, of spaces, of voices — together inside us. Transmissions that still are valued and maintain through precolonial and indigenous traditions. Transmissions we endangered, by trying at all costs to catch up the west in this race for modernity. Transmissions we forgot, we have to relearn, transmissions we have to listen. The survival of these legacies is in the hand of the Indigenous people, the black women, or even our western elderlies that no one listen to anymore. All the bodies that are less worthy for the imperial gaze. A work of remembrance is takin time as it inscribes itself in it. A work of remembrance, that is never considered as such: a work. And if so then devaluated. Even among ourselves. In the search of patriarchal recognition, we tend to abandons those vital practices onto less privilege’s bodies, in the realm of Capital. Our white feminism — in seeking to reach the statut-quos with men instead of deconstruct this complex system deep rooted in patriarchy and coloniality — reproduces forms of dominion over less privileged poor Women, especially the one of Color. While seeking equality inside the concept of modernity, in a linear form of time, we then had to relay the work of care to someone else. The modernity isn’t mean to be equal. Equality is never something to catch up. It is something that we need to build together. This labor of women — behind the close doors of homes and family circles — is a necessity for the society to function or for revolutions to happen.
In the search of recognition, we turned our back from our grandmothers to enter the Academia. We become imperial subject; the inanimate receptacle for the History with which they are feeding us. We hear, we repeat. We hear, we repeat. But what about listening? What about dialogues? While I was searching for roots and senses, I decided to go back at my Grandmother's House. After travelling the world and have heard lots of different stories, I realized now how much the stories that she told us were important.
As I’m moving in a much-privileged place in terms of technical or financial means, hierarchical position, power structures, places of knowledge production, I want to honor the woman who became the last living trunk of our family tree — through her stories, her care, her open mind, her looks on the world, her sincerity, her honesty, her respect and her love. My researches are grounded in a desire to interrogate and invert structures of knowledges. Who detained them and who gets to pass them to the future generation? As we more and more neglected and forget our ancestors, — as well as the voices of vulnerabilized bodies of others — and the knowledge they detain by putting them on the margin of our society, we abandoned a direct and sensible modes of transmission, preferring knowledges produce by institutions and recognized by it. Who gets to get to become an Archive and to live forever in imperial memories and times? Can we (re)organize organic and constellar feminine ways of transmission? I want Erna to become an Archive, I want to change the game of the institution from inside, by starting to bring one voice of the multitude inside it. One voice through times, and spaces. One voice that can start to shake the way we are producing knowledge. A voice that will never have been listen by the institution, normally. Echoes of transmission are haunting my head. The voice of my grand-mother will enter the Archive of the institution.
I started to take pictures of all the objects that are decorating my grandmother’s house. Some are the keeper of memories, and become more and more important as she is slowly losing hers. Other are just here to decorated, but in a way, they become the symbols of her own aesthetics. These objects are also shaping what means home for her. She chose and curated them in order to transform an empty box in her own space, where she can welcome family and friends. This patchwork is formed by all these collected objects. Printed on pieces of collected fabric, I found there. It could become a blanket or a tablecloth once sewed together again. This piece of textile is put in echoes with recorded memories of my grandmother — arranged together in a sound piece — that became a dialogue between me and her; between the objects and the memories. Objects are also hiding habits and brought together around one person, it could symbolize their multitude. Her stories will interrupt my reflections on transmission. As much as sound — referring to precolonial rooted oral transmission — textiles make sense for this work as it was usually a material that were — and still are in some parts of the world — pass down from generation to generation. Textile-works and weaving was also the task, in at least western societies, that was given to women. It still has a meaningful place in my family history, as both Erna’s parents were tailors. She grew up surrounded by textile, needles and bobbins. It is also a material that brings comfort and rest in the interior. A material that quietly make a room a home.
