“We all carry a dead child within us.“ Christian Boltanski quotes Tadeusz Kantor
We move through an abandoned house. The rooms hint at their former use without explicitly revealing it. An old class photo keeps appearing on the walls. On the back it reads: “class of 1911.” The people pictured remain nameless. The image begins to change: the children’s eyes move and explore the room in perfect synchrony.
The work draws on a historical photographic practice: post-mortem photography, in which the deceased were staged as if they were still alive—an attempt to capture presence in the image. In the video work, this principle is not simply shifted but subverted: the synchronized eye movements create an artificial liveliness that, precisely through its unnaturalness, makes the absence radically visible.
I position myself as a teacher within the group and become part of this arrangement. The boundary between image and intervention dissolves. In this visual logic, time is not organized linearly, but as a circulating system in which presence and disappearance are inextricably intertwined.
