Ajours, Gérard Titus-Carmel
(Part of Catherine Millet’s theme: (Auto)biography)

Exhuming a box of photographs from his childhood, Gérard Titus-Carmel finds himself confronted with the one he undoubtedly was, but whom he feels he has ceased to be without return. How to justify this interference of otherness in the relationship to oneself? How can we reconcile the sharpness of the memory, which these images reinforce, with the conviction that they are those of another? By what process to give an account of this apparently paradoxical impression: it was necessary to arrive where one stands to be able to recognize oneself there from where one left; to claim here the "solitude" like its essential condition to be able, there, to identify the ferments of it?

The artist's answer to this problem lies in the pages of what he calls "autobiographical dream". Neither autobiography, nor memoirs, Ajours wants to be a memorial enterprise where the truth would not be that of the memory (retrospective by definition, thus unstable, misleading, complacent), but that of the writing itself, endowed with its own requirements.

L’Atelier contemporain, 2021
Text in French
Hard cover
23 x 15 cm
752 pages
ISBN: 978-2-85035-048-1