We are creatures of remembrance. Each individual is inhabited by his past, just as each people is haunted by its history. How do these remembrances intermingle? How is it possible to go from individual recollections, ours, those which belong only to us, to collective recall, that which we share? How do these remembrances get put together, build their interdependence, without our ever knowing who, among this one or that, has power over our future?

Through his works Christian Boltanski questions these processes of recall, processes which are not linear, mechanisms which escape us, time that slips away and remembrances gone adrift. He places a single unmoving point at the centre of this reflection:  death, around which individual and collective memory tragically intertwines. It becomes the point from which each remembrance is rebuilt, a responsibility falling to those who, contemporaries ensure a very fragile survival of the traces that we leave in their recollection.

Read on : Remembering those who are unknown