CAC Brétigny

Everything started, as it always does, with a series of encounters.

These encounters led to a project of transmission and construction of memory based on the archives of the veterans association directed by M. Nicollin and the narratives of its members and of other locals. This construction of memory requires updating the underlying issues and creating archives with people of the younger generation who have become the unconscious recipients of these stories.

This artistic project is centered on the political, social, psychological, and esthetic dimensions of war, especially the conflicts of the past 50 years. It aims to constitute a public space of memory and the collective unconscious, and to identify, study, and preserve visual, audio, and literary memory archives in collaboration with people involved in conflicts.

This is an attempt then to actualize the notion of oblivion such as Walter Benjamin understood it, “To reestablish concealed or forgotten meanings… to save a threatened past, to make heard the stifled voices of history without which there could be no redeemed humanity.” Indeed, the possible memories of past events are the potential building blocks of a history that is yet to be written. These forgotten figures, dead ends and anachronisms also recount and testify to what has been seen and heard (photographs, texts, personal accounts). But the same goes for hearsay, i.e. for what has been neither seen nor heard through personal experience but only through the oral transmission of someone else. Images and narratives will be mostly used to experiment with memories, anecdotes, personal experiences, analyses and quotations.

The history of the war constantly unfolds on many levels, i.e., history of communities, families, the entity and its mutations. The complexity is therefore very subtle, and simplifications and generalizations impossible. Through personal histories, documents and their complex captions, a different kind of knowledge works its way in, more akin to the possibilities of a still unexplored archive than to the knowledge already established by historians. The project also questions the process of documentation itself and examines how history is being transmitted, transformed and manipulated. Rather than identifying a complex geo-political space, the collected documents demonstrate their own pseudo-readability and the possibility of including a different kind of image, experience, and words. With a critical look at the supremacy of the documents in topical narratives and chronicles, the project enables participants to project and interpret the articulation of a historical memory presented as a series of open enigmas that are filled with references.

An archive and a history are brought into existence.

A project by Angélique Buisson with the War Veterans Association of Brétigny-sur-Orge, the voluntary military service, and the Municipal Department ofYouth of Brétigny-sur-Orge. This project benefited from the support of  SDAT (Service du Développement et de l'Action Territoriale) as a "Culture and social link" project.

With a Diplôme national supérieur d'expression plastique (DNSEP), a Master’s degree in art book edition and a postgraduate degree in contemporary art and documents from the École européenne supérieure de l’image of Angoulême, Angélique Buisson is an artist, researcher and specialist in micro-edition and editorial art practices. Her work focuses on fragmented chronologies, narrative speculation and shattered plots. Archives and documents are at the heart of her questioning, and in particular the relationship between the different documentary forms and memory policies.