The last chapter deals with individual and collective memories: to what extent can we rely on our memories? It presents two artists who work like historians, using found photographs and archival documents for reconstructing the lives of people they don't know. Photography becomes a tool for research, but at the same time the artists question our ideas about photographic evidence. In the stories told by Virginie Rebetez and Shi Zhen the documents cannot prove anything; the reality they represent is overruled by the projections of the spectator, who creates a new story based on a combination of facts and imagination. The coherence of the narration appears to be the only reliable reference.

Memories of Things Past is a photo book project inspired by a diary of 19th century that I found by chance at a flea market in Brussels. The author of diary was a lady signed Laure Lorthioir De Mot.

She recounted in her diary the stories from 1872 to 1954, about their big brilliant family and their good old times: a single lady travelled around the world hundreds years before, between two world wars, and a life with deep love and passion. Letters, photographs and papers are well kept, as they would be.

The first volume of book is about a questioning the limit between the reality of history and the rosy retrospection of memories, as well as photographic and editorial practices: in re-reading and re-using, in a stream of consciousness, photographic images culled from Laure’s and from mine, with a selection of Laure’s diary in her original handwriting. To give my own words, none of us could be the real owner of objects; we are only the keepers of thingsfor a time, as for the objects,its owners will change and that comes to a part of the nature of things.

After finishing the first volume of my work=, my curiosity urged me to for look for her family members who are alive today in order to to learn about their current situations. With a lot of luck, I get to meet Christine, who is the great-granddaughter of Laure, and then we are preparing to collaborate for the second volume of this project.

Thanks to Laure, her wonderful gift allows me to be a part of this long journey from time past. And thanks to the time, which allows every single individual to exist.