In 1968, Christian Boltanski presented a film in Paris' Ranelagh Theatre – La Vie impossible de Christian Boltanski – which contained one of his work's key paradoxes: giving the account of a fundamental impossibility, that of giving an account. For the artist who was doing what he called a "personal ethnology", there was a vanity inherent to his work:  the impossibility of completely re-creating what had been, and especially that of re-creating his own life.  The story, his or that of others, is created. And more than anything, it is memory that makes stories. The artist evidences this by breaking with the autobiographical pact, or "the commitment the author makes in telling his life directly (or a part, or an aspect of his life) in a spirit of truth" (Philippe Lejeune). If the objects presented as having belonged to him were never his, this does not mean there was an intention to fool his world.

Christian Boltanski, Vingt-sept possibilités d’autoportrait, 2007.
Photo Anne Franski. All rights reserved.

But there is a way of expressing it: the important thing isn’t there; what counts is what you're going to recognize in yourself out of what you believe to be my story. As Christian Boltanski emphasizes: "An artist has no more life, he is no more than a mirror to others, he is no more than one who shows". By making up his story, the artist enlightens us as to the way that our own story gets built up over time, and retrospectively. The believable wins over the strict truth; is this a matter of the triumph of art?