I Will Be Your Image, 2007

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For I Will Be Your Image, I worked with photographs from my parents’ family album. Many of the images dated from before I was born, yet they formed part of my earliest visual memory. Some depicted relatives I knew and gave me a reassuring sense of continuity and belonging. Others showed people I could not identify. These images fascinated me precisely because they seemed to belong to a private history that was somehow mine, yet remained inaccessible.

The family album became a space in which memory and absence coexisted. The photographs appeared to promise access to my parents’ lives before my own existence, while at the same time making clear how incomplete that access would always remain.

I reproduced the selected photographs using a newspaper silkscreen technique. The coarse printing process reduced their specificity: faces became less distinct, details disappeared, and differences of time and place were flattened. Images that had originated in a particular family history began to resemble fragments of an anonymous, archetypal family archive. The tension between the intimacy of the source material and the visual language of mass reproduction became central to the work.

The installation was made in a dark, abandoned room in the former Philips factory in Eindhoven. The industrial architecture remained exposed: ceramic tiles, pipes, cables, metal beams and traces of the building’s previous function. Rather than arranging the photographs as a conventional sequence, I scattered them across walls, ceilings and structural elements, with one denser concentration forming a kind of unstable centre.

Each visitor entered the darkened space carrying a small flashlight. The images were not immediately available as a whole. They had to be searched for, discovered individually and connected through movement. This fragmented mode of looking echoed the way memory itself operates: indirectly, selectively and without a complete overview.

Only gradually could the photographs be recognised as belonging to a family archive. At that point, the distinction between private memory and collective history became less stable. The personal images of one family were absorbed into an industrial environment and reproduced through a technique associated with newspapers and public circulation.

The installation brought together different forms of memory: the history embedded in the photographs, the lost function of the factory, and the viewer’s own associations. Rather than reconstructing a coherent family narrative, the work focused on what remains uncertain — unidentified faces, incomplete biographies, missing connections and images that survive after their original context has disappeared.

In this sense, I Will Be Your Image was less an attempt to recover the past than to examine how images mediate our relationship to it. A family photograph can provide evidence of a life, but it can also make absence more visible. What appears intimate and personal may, once detached from its original context, become strangely anonymous and open to other histories.

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