Where we grew up

I struggle to define the influence of my so-called “cultural heritage” in my own life. Maybe having been brought up with several languages and parents from different origins has given me the opportunity to see life mainly as a big adventure regardless of our respective cultures.

I’m nevertheless interested in what we make of our cultural past. I believe that we still filter “this past” through our present in what must be a very different culture to the one in which our ancestors existed. 

I was brought up in the South of France, in a region called Occitanie. There, people still use a dialect called Occitan however, the main and official language nowadays remains French.

For this book, I used several photos I took of a place called Minerve, a tiny village in that region rich with its very medieval past. Minerve was the place where the last Cathars, the members of a Christian religious sect that existed between the 12th and 13th centuries, eventually were burnt at stake by the Crusaders.

I then made a collage with prints, photos, ink, watercolours based on the landscape and surroundings of the village, statues of angels and saints found in a nearby church, and one sculpture of a bull, as a raw and masculine energy. 

The chosen background represents the wilderness of this landscape, architecture and past from the Middle Ages. In short, my heritage is a wild land with an imaginary topography shaped by its religious and political structures.