“Paper Pictures” emerges from a deeply personal absence: the lack of photographs from my own childhood due to ideological reasons of my parents. Rather than approaching this absence as a deficit, I saw it as an opportunity to build an archive of my choice, and turned it into a methodology. Through borrowing, weaving, glitching, and reframing, I construct a speculative family album, one composed of found images, mass-produced calendar photography, and a small selection of my own pictures. This act of reconstruction moves beyond nostalgia, asking what memory can become when it is actively made, rather than merely recalled. A film essay developed alongside the visual work deepens this inquiry, exploring memory as a layered, affective process. The work symbolizes a response to my father’s reasoning behind his choice to exclude photographs from our lives, as well as his appreciation for sublime nature imagery; Although no photographs were taken within my family, I was surrounded by images of nature, cut out from calendars, adorning the walls of my childhood apartment. I explore these images again, by zooming in on the scanned landscapes, screenshotting parts of them which I would photograph myself, had I a camera in hand. Resulting from this process are new abstract landscapes where the scale and subjects get blurred, being transformed from pictures to look at, into places to visit. These images are contrasting to the black & white pictures I took while revisiting the neighborhood, almost like two worlds opposing one another.

Mass-produced calendars are framed as vessels of intimacy and glitches as sites of world-building. The installation is consciously unconventional. The role I take on as curator of my own memories invites questions about authorship, editing, and the social codes embedded in visual archives. Essentially, the work aims to reform the notion of what private archives can be, beyond the portrayal of a family.

From calendars to rental listings, the ephemeral and time-bound image sources can all be used as archives to be mined in building personal narratives. I’ve begun to question the need for photographs themselves, and their role in constructing the recollections of one's past. To what extent, I now ask, does the originality of evidence matter in the act of remembering? What if photographic absence, usually linked to trauma, coercion or erasure, could be rephrased as a form of freedom?