Vergessen und Erinnern (version 3, 2017)

Forgotten and Remembering

Video projection, HD 16:9, time 7‘ 56“, loop, colour, sound

When Françoise Caraco reminisces about her year in Paris, she says: ‘I’m homesick for the city in which I spent a year feeling like a stranger.’ A series of 80 shots are projected and commented with an offstage voice. In the first person Caraco talks about Paris, which for her remains a place she stayed in temporarily, comments on spontaneous impressions and juxtaposes singular moments with general situations: ‘My studio in the sunshine; actually in rained all summer long’, or adds tersely, ‘Some photos I quite simply like.’

Altogether there are 1900 photos, taken ‘lightly and quickly’ with a Smartphone. The resulting effect is that not each and every shot is a remembrance – not the place, not the mood, not one’s own presence there. It is equally a well-known effect that sifting through photos evokes other emotions than those felt when and where they were taken. Photographing appropriates the exotic, supplemented with one’s own memories becomes transiently part of oneself, and is ultimately mirrored in the work realised by Françoise Caraco under the title Vergessen und Erinnern.

Text: Ruth Horak