À mettre dans mon cercueil ou à brûler

The photo of an unknown man and the menu of a dinner party. This is the enigma my grandmother left when she died. How to tell what you can’t ask anymore? That’s what À mettre dans mon cercueil ou à brûler, made with archives and photos, tries to imagine.

6 letters from April to August 1955. 2 photos. Those are the only documents I could tie to the mystery my grandmother, a woman I always knew as conservative and inflexible, left us when she died in 2018: the photo of an unknown military man who isn’t my grandfather, the fancy menu of a dinner party and a radical note, with a choice...

It said À mettre dans mon cercueil ou à brûler.

Put it in my coffin or burn it.

Who was Gilberte, my grandmother?

For sure, she was a peculiar woman, severe and full of contradictions: military nurse, member of the French Resistance during WWII, single mother abandoned by my biological grandfather in a very puritan France, independent woman with ambitions, but obsessed with the leading figures of “Great Men” at the same time… Good manners were also crucial to her, specially at the table.

For me, her real lifepath always seems as captivating as her need to fictionalize and shape her past to dreams of grandeur that never came true. Her love story with the man to burn and the fancy menu of the dinner party that we found in the envelope of her last wishes were never part of the stories she told us repeatedly, with vanity and seriousness.

How to tell what’s impossible to know for certain?

How to tell what you can’t ask anymore?

With all the archive, the letters and photos of Gilberte, my own photos, texts, found archives and other materials, but also with care and the gaze of the present, À mettre dans mon cercueil ou à brûler is an ongoing visual and textual project about imagination and the significance of silence in women’s personal stories.