In The journey, Marilia Destot imagines a poetic and memorial travel to her Jewish Lithuanian roots. Fascinated by her family’s diaspora, she returns to the country of her maternal ancestors, Lithuania, and revisits their history and the Litvaks’ one, between exile and Shoah. Her quest for her family narrative, for the missing genealogical part or her lost jewish heritage, is confronted to the absence of archives and the scarce official memory process in a country oppressed for so long.
Immersed in nature, Marilia Destot photographs the absence, traces, places and faces that echo the past. She recreates an imaginary family album, made of Lithuanian landscapes pierced and illuminated by needle-drawn “presences”, and torn collage portraits that reveal the layers of time and memory. A physical and metaphorical exploration of the photographic medium, accompanied by the music of Lithuanian composer Vaida Striaupaité-Beinariené. The journey conveys a fragile, altered, invisibilized memory, floating from the present to the past: the memory of the Litvaks, the Lithuanian Jewish community, exiled or exterminated. By filling the void and amnesia with light and poetry, Marilia Destot re-appropriates, revives and transmits a fading memory, inviting us to reflect on the universal remembrance of the lost and the dispersed.
Ségolène Brossette Galerie
Ségolène Brossette Galerie which represents a large majority of French artists, defends a committed art while creating bridges with the sensitive world. Through its exhibitions, the Gallery wishes to question our relationship with the living world as well as with our civilisation, driven by sociological, ecological and identity-related commitments.