The metal staircase to our oldest basement in the South of France corkscrews down into rubble. The room collapsed at some disputed time for some disputed reason. But before it collapsed, it was the grandfather personal storage for “good wines”. We have some Burgundian ancestry, so it must have been good ones indeed. Maybe some mythical 1949 vintages? More likely some Pouilly Fuissé, the grandmother’s favourite tipple. What else was there in the cave? Well, there was something, but no-one could really remember. Some collective amnesia barred by a pile of trunks, hidden from view, banned from thought.
What is there under the layers of dust? If anything, objects more forgotten than the suitcases and trunks, maybe significant personal artefacts, literally the deepest buried family secrets.
Digging up objects, whether from the ground, from crates or merely re-discovering them, the thrill of the find is always there.
These objects are memories, mementoes, artefacts. They have and are material memories. These are the keys we used to lock the wooden gate. Their actual reality may be lost to time, they may even never been part of my personal story. Most of the photo albums were stashed at the back of shelves full of bedding. A sealed lead box with my grandmother trinkets as well. I never saw them. Never knew they existed. Re-discovered, they become crucial inflexions or insignificant pebbles I daisy-chain into a narrative. They have memories I drain into significance. Anyway, all of these objects are only ever half-remembered, or half-forgotten as you prefer, like that 1873 unlabelled drawing that was framed and stored in a trunk. At worse, these artefacts mark a path through the foggy marshes of time.
Some objects I think I know since ever, only to re-discover their relevance. Some just remain the very puzzle they ever were. Other still become a new mystery.
That glass table under the mirror? An up-cycled Louis the 16th settee. Why would anyone keep that hideous 19th century figure? Who is that on the painting? Looks like my grandmother, but no. Her grandmother? Too recent. Anyone else? The fascination if to thread the possible stories of these objects, into a possible, then probable timeline.
It is the first step to give them significance.
Picture a museum: a collection of artefacts curated in such a way to tell a story, possibly History. So far, the only thing I have is a mass, a heap of memories, not even a collection. Myriads of stories from which only remain objects. And objects are never objective. We give them meaning. They are first and foremost memories retold: that was in a display, the last skull butterfly I ever saw in Claviers. These butterflies used to be everywhere. My cat brought it back alive one morning in the 70s. Both of us so proud. To my grandmother? An ecological disaster for an endangered species.
And so I shape the stories of objects into a probable narrative. Probably only. It is not even unique to start with. How could it be?
Objects are pieces of many stories; their narratives may split up, diverge into conflicting stories, but actually they simply exist in parallel universes for all we know. They are narrative reconstruction.
The story is only ever in our imagination all that time, the significance of objects only ever personal, yet critical, relevance. Objects inspire, evoke. They are proofs of our own relevance. They anchor our self-representation: they are just about as real as our thoughts.
That is my fascination with objects.
And so, to share with you my family history, I lay these artefacts down on the table, as they surface. Not in a curated, structured, ordered, neat nor even empathetic way, but in their lively disorder. Look at them, listen to the stories, remain conscious that their insidious coils are woven in my personal narrative.
And these objects can feed your own memories too.
The machete
This is the actual machete my grandfather used to open up the trails là-bas (French for “over there”) in Katanga, Congo.
When it was dug up from one of the crates, the handle had been wormed through, the blade, pitted and rusted. It took me a summer to cradle it back to life, hand-carving a handle (it is still the one I use), boiling back to shape the impala leather sheath that had been slid on after a successful hunt. Bringing back to life more than a tool, bringing back to life my very own Indiana Jones machete.
It is just a standard coupe-coupe, mass-produced and used throughout Western Africa after the turn of the century. Standard equipment for the Senegalese Tirailleurs, the local trail guides and hunters.
Simple function and design. Absolute significance: The Adventure.
(extract from video)
Horns and skulls
My grandfather could not wait to travel back to Africa after his studies in Paris. The main reason? Missing vastness and wilderness of Africa. And hunting.
And so, some trophies of these hunts survive, both in text, photos, video and sometimes horns and skulls. These were never displayed, left to decay in a trunk at the bottom of the pile.
As the Matriarchy was pretty much the Dog Ladies Federation, hunting always sat somewhat uneasily in the family narrative. From what my grandmother shared, from what we can see in the movies, that was hunting for feeding the family as much as the team, and from memories, the village visited that day. After all, the Europeans had state of the art weaponry.
(extract from video)
The hunt was both art and communion with nature. Woe to those who could not shoot and the “viandards” (meat pilers). An animal only wounded would be a huge liability for the entire community, and the cull had to be sustainable. No “bison extermination” under my grandfather’s watch. Well, he was always rather isolated amongst his colleagues on this topic it seems.
Hunting will have its own chapter as soon as I dig out my grandfather’s notes.
The stationery boxes
The stationery boxes I found contained rulers, pens, stacks of pencil lead, and the leads holders, criteriums. Enough for 50 years it seemed.
One belonged to my grandfather. The other one, to my father. Though the sets were separated by decades, they still looked the same.
Both men were engineers. One was a geologist, the other pulp and paper engineer. One was busy mapping Katanga. The other building paper mills from India to Vietnam. To both, these instruments were the tools of their trade, they were function, relevance and status. My father drew a papermill near Saigon, at Bien Hoa. My grandfather drew the strata maps around Jadotville. One speaks of Joghi Gopa, Bien Hoa and Kuala Kraai. The other dreamed of unexplored realms deep in the jungle.
Photo albums, letters, postcards and 8mm films
The third category of items received are messages. Messages to oneself: photo albums, this is what I find important and worth remembering. Messages from others: photos of an event I thought you should remember. And postcards, the ancestor of social media, to be sent, and shared. The fascinating habit to have entire “postcard albums” is a most fascinating one. And then there are the films.
These are the backbone of the memories.
All of the narrative, all of that part of my story, all of it. Unfair memories of course, unadulterated romanticism, for sure, but even objects do not have an exclusive reality. It is how they wrapped themselves into the rest of my story that gives them relevance and significance.
Stay tuned for more.
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