Les filles de l'air - Marie-Blanche Rossi

“Les filles de l’air” is a spatial and interactive book that offers a unique reading experience combining text, sound, images, and videos generated by movement. An introspective project, it tells the story of my immigration, an apparent result of the imperceptible transmission of family ties. It unfolds through a fragmentary narrative, whose pieces form part of a larger whole, embodied by the exhibition’s central element: the book. Full understanding of the story emerges through movement in space and is reconstituted within the physical book through the combination of the different media used.

At the core of a meticulous exploration begun several months ago is the artist’s book of the same name—the project’s first iteration—in which I gather fragments of memories that surface here and there from my mind. Its title refers to plants whose roots grow outside the soil. Throughout its pages, I express a persistent sensation dating back to childhood: the feeling that my family and I remained slightly on the margins of the scene unfolding before us. A little here, not quite there, we lived our experiences and carved out a particular place in the world—a place I would liken to a form of nomadism.

A true quest for identity, “Les filles de l’air” observes my journey as an immigrant and the loss of bearings that accompanies it, in order to bring forth new possible understandings. Through this fragmentary narrative, I use the process of reminiscence to represent the course of memory, often irregular and incomplete. Now captured within the experience, these fragments of story bear witness to a partial and imperfect reconstruction of childhood memories, evoking lived and idealized sensations.

The resulting installation takes the form of a mental object which, through its structure and the media that compose it, evokes a state of reverie punctuated by brief moments of clarity. Fixed on paper through text, these moments of lucidity give way to the blur and dreamlike quality of images projected in video. In this way, I hope to offer the audience the opportunity to expand their imagination in response to the work, as well as to reflect on their own existence.