si je meurs / if I die

  • Dates
    2011 - 2016
  • Author
  • Topics Portrait, Daily Life, Fine Art

Muriel Hasbun is recipient of numerous awards: Howard Chapnick Grant, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and Fulbright Scholar. Exhibitions: Venice Biennale, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Fotofest, Pinta, CCEsv, Art Museum of the Americas, Bienal de Fotografía, Mexico, Rencontres d'Arles.

si je meurs / if I die

The photographs of si je meurs /if I die explore the fragile space between absence and presence, and continue the conversation I’ve had with my mother, Janine Janowski, and my family and communities, through my work, over 30 years.

Moving through a subjective, diasporic space infused with a sense memory of loss, the photos evolved naturally as we confronted the most human of destinies:

--As if I could ever get used to it

--As if the picture would somehow wish it away…

In the process, I discover, examine and reconfigure an archive, paying homage to our relationship and alluding to the legacy that she left behind.

With these intimate and personal photographs I also give perspective to the historically-significant, public narrative of Janine’s life as a cultural promoter in El Salvador during the civil war and its aftermath, now reactivated through laberinto projects, my socially engaged, arts, education and cultural legacy platform.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Janine, 2012.01.03, San Salvador, archival pigment print, 2015. I practiced saying good bye over and over again, getting as close as I could to a wispy lock of her once chamomile curls.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Janine, 2012.01.03, San Salvador, archival pigment print, 2015. --As if I could ever get used to it --As if the picture would somehow wish it away

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Janine, Homage (José Nicolás), 2013.01.16, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2015. --As if it would make it any easier when she called me one day to say, "I woke up this morning and Death was next to me. It is time." (“Me desperté esta mañana y la Muerte estaba junto a mi cama. Ya es hora.”) --Or maybe she said it in French.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Homage (Rothko and Ianelli), 2014.01.22, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2015. Rothko and Ianelli appeared to me on the adobe walls of her home.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Homage, (El altar de la memoria), 2014.03.25, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2016. Moisés Barrios' Altar de la Memoria held 500 years of history together with the secrets of her life.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Janine (Agfa-Portriga), from the archive, Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2016. A survivor of the Holocaust by hiding together with her immediate family in the Auvergne region of France, my mother, Janine Janowski went to El Salvador in 1958 to work as the teacher of the French Consul's children. This is her passport photo.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Family Frames, 2016.07.06, from the archive, c.1960’s, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2016. When my father Antonio Hasbun Z. made the family portrait with his Rolleiflex on a tripod circa 1964, we sat on the first piece of furniture that my parents had ever owned together –-a hand me down that my paternal grandparents gave them for their new home. I gathered us on the bench once again this past summer.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Super 8mm film, 2014.09.20, from the archive, c. 1960s, Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2015. With the gathering and close scrutiny of a dispersed family archive, I’ve assembled fragments into narratives and reconstructed a world lost to forced migration, assimilation and genocide.

© Muriel Hasbun - Ojos (Mami y yo), from the archive, Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2015.
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Ojos (Mami y yo), from the archive, Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2015.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Je me souviens, c.1945 (1986), from the archive, revisited 2016, Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2016. The first photograph I ever made of my family was a portrait of my maternal grandmother Gouta, holding a portrait of her with her two children after France’s liberation, circa 1945. After my mother died, I found remnants of the fabric of the dress that Gouta wore when I photographed her 30 years ago.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Juif, from the archive (1997), Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2015. In 1998, I told the story of my mother’s hiding during World War II with an installation of photographs printed on my grandmother’s linens. I had photographed my mother in the most vulnerable state that I had ever seen her. Broken bones and all, she pulled out a Jewish star and posed for me. I could never print that photo.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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In Memoriam, 2014.06.12, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2015. The entrance to my mother’s house is a sphere, with portholes to the zodiac signs of her loved ones. As you step inside, the floor is not quite stable and every sound you utter reverberates within your body.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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At the Center of the Labyrinth / En el centro del laberinto, 2016.07.06, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2016. Janine named her art gallery “el laberinto” (the labyrinth). She was obsessed with Nietzsche, Borges and Artaud. Unraveling our relationship and sharing in the impact of her legacy have placed me at the center of the labyrinth.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Blue (Martorell), 2012.11.08, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2015. In those moments in between, in the last few days of my mother’s life, I realized that the spirit of Antonio Martorell’s works –which had graced the walls of our dining room— had kept me company all along.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Giza and the Sphinx, 2016.07.26, from the archive, 2008 and 1970’s, Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2016. Two years after my father’s death, I projected my father’s images of Egypt onto the round mirror in my childhood’s bedroom. This summer, I re-photographed the transparencies I made then, excavating the memories of land that my family has carried, through the generations and in our diasporas.

© Muriel Hasbun - 2012.11.04, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2015.
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2012.11.04, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2015.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Trace, 2015.02.25, Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2015. Grief is an intimate and important ordeal. It sharpens the senses and makes everything speak.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Daniel, from the archive, c. 2004, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2016. In 2004, I made a video of my son Daniel at the black volcanic sand beach where I grew up in El Salvador. This footage became part of the interactive video installation barquitos de papel, where paper boats become the vessels of my family’s and the public’s migration stories.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Gift, 2012.07.29, El Congo, archival pigment print, 2015. My mother asked Daniel to choose something in her home as a gift from her. Making this photograph connected me to a memory of Daniel at the beach in El Salvador, where he found an Egyptian scarab that belonged to my father, buried in the sand. This would propel me to re-make the video, Scheherazade.

© Muriel Hasbun - Image from the si je meurs / if I die photography project
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Janine, 2011.12.11, San Salvador / Washington, DC, archival pigment print, 2015. In 2006, I filmed a close up of my mouth saying, “My mother told me I was conceived on the island of Guanaja, off the coast of Honduras.” Seeing my mother’s lips on the screen while we talked on Skype reminded me of that footage, convincing me even more that it was time to re-visit Scheherazade. (Scheherazade joins my son's heartbeats in utero with my mother's last breaths.)

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