In the reflection of your skull
I discern the face
of all those who succeeded
until your birth
infinite spiral of deployed bellies
a lace of flesh
woven of blood
a same impetus
unfolds
to the tips of my fingers
which brush
your delicate bones
between your evanescent atoms, mother-river
I access the transparency of the world
where the wind modulates into a single cry
that of my birth
and your last gasp
a single breath
I knew nothing of death before my mother's.
Then, they multiplied.
Yolanda, my exuberant Italian fairy godmother, mother of mine, whose childlike laughter grew suns in my darkest hours, extinguished a few days before her 90th birthday.
Jade, Yumi, and Zaëlle, my magical feline creatures, who accompanied me for nearly two decades, disappeared one after the other in less than two years, leaving behind them an ancestral house too silent.
On my desk, the last letter from my grandmother oscillates under the fan's breath, as if my fairy godmother were playfully agitating it. Hello my dear, I love you very much with all my heart. She repeated her love to me so often, with these same words and others just as strong, holding me against her with all her vigor; the imprint of her intensity resurfaces each time my eyes meet her elegant writing, blue ink on soft paper. Just next to this message, my mother's gaze observes me, attentively.
Tonight, I am absorbed by a scene from my novel-in-progress. My narrator, a woman from the future, fuses with multiple beings long gone. The fusion is related to the totality of these creatures' existence, death included, and not to a single moment of their life. This idea is obviously linked to the multiple bereavements I have just gone through, but it sprouted after readings about quantum entanglement.
Entanglement is a phenomenon of quantum physics that occurs when two subatomic particles, such as electrons or photons, are united in such a way that the quantum state of each particle is intimately linked to the other, regardless of the distance separating them.
In my artistic modus operandi, the maturation time of a fiction text is accompanied by a practice in digital art. Three decades ago, before the advent of metaverses that introduced me to virtual photography and 3D modeling, I explored analog photography; I used my Pentax K1000, a fully mechanical camera body; I found models, places, or objects to highlight, I lived an exquisite moment during the shot then I spent whole nights locked in my darkroom, developing my silver films, enlarging photos on fiber paper, in a hypnotic state. My literary voice emerged at that moment, without pencil or keyboard, free, between my neurons; I heard sentences whispered by my first narrator, a fuzzy entity, faceless, but whose presence intensified in me. My fascination with the superposition of states perhaps comes precisely from this strange way of entering creation in two different ways at once. Like organs within a single body, these processes stimulate each other.
My eyes slide from the screen to themonochrome portrait of my mother, propped up on a stack of books on my desk. Her head stands out against a black background. She gazes at me head-on, directly. I made this portrait a few weeks before her death. When I'm worried, I immerse my gaze in hers. Her expression seems anxious, but most of the time she radiates an aura of serenity, and sometimes even excitement. I know that I project onto this image my own emotional state, that her embryo of a smile was energized by the group's energy off-screen while her physical pain was unbearable. However, this photograph is a real trace. I find the smell of my mother's skin in it; the fold of her lips makes me hear the timbre of her voice. The curve of her upper eyelids lets the memory of her tears slide, calling for my own.
My mother persists, entirely, in my field of perception. She is both dead and alive.
At least, she is perfectly entangled, in me.
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3D modeling & animation | videos | text : KAROLINE GEORGES
music : ALEX FOREST
