La Saison du deuil
Grief is constantly evolving. It shrinks and expands as you breathe; it visits you when you least expect it.
With time, grief becomes less of an open wound, and more like a scar that aches when the weather changes.
After the loss of my partner in 2015, I recently went back to the small town of Kampot, Cambodia, where we first met and lived for a while.
As I photographed the spaces in between, I was attempting to capture staged memories as a reflection of my inner state. For a fleeting moment I was suspended in time, floating within that liminal space that hangs between life and death.
A space of stillness and silence, a space for grieving, healing and rebuilding.
Memory can sometimes be located inside this interval, this space where the departed and those remaining can still co-exist for a little while. The Season of Grief is a fragmentary work that articulates the long process of grief and loss, and the role memory plays in shaping this journey.
The series explores the stillness of grief, while mapping its solitude and the difficulties around sharing this feeling with others. Grief is everywhere, yet it is specific—The Season of Grief is a taste of this particular aloneness.
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Retracing my journey through the places we have been together, I went back to Bangkok. As I played the role of tourist in my own life, I found myself drifting towards key places that hold dear memories. Each step was guided by your definitive absence, carried by the feeling that you could be just around the corner, but each time I turned, you were not there. Some places where we used to stay were destroyed or no longer there: it felt like another one of your slow disappearances, these places that made your fleeting existence a bit more tangible. At times, it was like the entire world was grieving your loss.
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Detail of a broken statue of Marie in an old abandoned church in Bokor, Cambodia. You took me there on our first date.
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Cambodia. The joy and the pain of being back. Unwanted memories kept rushing back to me, leaving me disintegrating in a limbo of grief. I can still see the beauty around me, but I can’t deny that it's painful.
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The bed has always held a central space in my pain. I had to relearn how to sleep alone. Unconsciously I would make space for my loved one in the bed; I was making space for his body, for his embrace. The death of my father, who passed six months before my partner, left a similar void in my mother's life and in her bed. Five years after his passing, she still sleeps on her side, as if leaving space for him to come back from a long journey.
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Dog sleeping in an empty bar in Kampot, the small town where we used to live. The place has changed so much that it's sometimes hard to recognize.
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Vietnam. Plastic shoes in a ray of sun. I developed an interest for objects that people leave behind, objects that could potentially outlive them. Materialism is another lost fight against death as ultimately time swallows everything.
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Roaming in the night market looking for encounters that could no longer happen. Finding only solitude and ghosts. Repairing the past, one step at a time.
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It took me almost seven years to go back to Cambodia. Seven years is the time for a complete new cycle. It’s the time that it takes for your hair to grow and fall. It’s the time for a death and a rebirth.
