Je préfère les oubliés - A New Gaze
Fluorescent ink prints activated by ultraviolet light, phosphorescent 3D-printed sculptures, a risograph booklet printed with fluorescent ink, and an exhibition display structured around the alternation between visible light and UV light.
2026 Version
Je préfère les oubliés is a project initiated in 2016 from anonymous family archives. In 2026, it is reactivated in a more technological, more distanced form, while preserving its original core: questioning what remains of images when personal history dissolves.
The project is based on vernacular photographs stripped of their narrative context. Figures, gestures, and situations lose their documentary function to become forms, silhouettes, fragmentary presences.
Memory Without Nostalgia
The project does not seek to restore memory; rather, it works through distance, via the removal of captions, the erasure of uses, the neutralization of affect, and the plastic transformation of the documents.
What remains is neither documentary nor intimate. It is a reinvented memory, displaced toward a more abstract, almost playful territory, where images become luminous objects rather than traces.
An Ecology of Minor Images
Je préfère les oubliés explores the value of secondary images, those that do not enter official history, those that remain in boxes, those no longer known what to do with.
By transposing them into contemporary dispositifs such as UV light, fluorescent printing, and digital hybridization, the project questions our current relationship to the archive by raising several issues: what remains of an image once its utility is removed, what becomes of a memory when it is deprived of narrative, and can a family photograph be viewed without attempting to recognize it.
The 2026 version asserts a clear position: images are not evidence but active surfaces; they do not convey truth, they produce experience.
