Yatim

Emilien Itim grew up with the diapositives and the family album of his father. Surrounded by these family images, he created an imaginary world that he is exploring. He decided to take an interest in the archive questioning identities and origines.

Born in Switzerland, Emilien Itim grew up with the diapositives and the family album of his father that showed him as a child. Surrounded by these family images, he created an imaginary world that he now wishes to explore. Emilien decided to take an interest in the family archives, and to examine his origins through the archives his father had created and entrusted to him. The question of identity is inherent in the images that emerge from his research.

The inheritance came from his father. The latter, of Algerian origin, was one of a group of children brought to Switzerland in 1963 by the NGO Terre des Hommes for health reasons. He has remained in Switzerland to this day, returning regularly to Algeria to keep in touch with his family.

Through his investigation, Emilien discovers the meaning of his family name, Itim, which in Algerian dialect means «orphan» and in literary Arabic is called Yatim. It is this correlation between the event and its meaning that gives the project its title.

While researching his family’s past, Emilien discovered photos with no captions and no instructions for use. He then set about reconstructing, interpreting and restoring them. The corpus of images presented in the Yatim, is made up of a multitude of elements that go beyond photographs. Combining archival documents (exchanges of letters between the Algerian parents and the Swiss couple, copies of documents from official registers) and new productions, Emilien takes a singular look at his family’s past.

These fragments of the past - texts and stories narrated by his father - mingle with the territories and people Emilien imagines. His thought process is symbolically represented by objects and landscapes that evoke the comings and goings, travels and peregrinations of one family to another, one world to another.

Today, Emilien reactivates the family archive by planning a trip to Algeria this spring. As he reinterprets the documents, he will explore the territory in search of the family home and other memories along the way. Planning to travel with his father, the journey will question the relationship between memory and images, exploring the temporality of both. Fragmented images and memories evoke the history and choices made years ago. Through these images, the spatial and temporal order will emerge, creating context through his personal interpretation. He may find some answers to the missing pieces of his own history.