vague recollections (2026)
a short summary of a complicated insight within a larger body of work not to be published here
vague recollections is a mass of blank/faded 35mm colour positives accumulated over the course of four years during a PhD doctorate named: ‘The Web of Intergenerational Healing: Kabyle Women & Isefra’. I set out to document the oral tradition of Kabyle Isefra and my family’s memory of my Grandmother’s poetry only to discover they could not remember. This became a failure of the research, and a crucial shift that moved me away from remembering and preservation towards forgetting, corrosion and not knowing in the slippery contradictions of intergenerational healing.
Remembering can be clumsy and painful. It is not necessarily an antidote to denial, or denying trauma.
Forgetting can be a form of erasure that keeps a person or a community safe. It can be a means of preserving a present that is not defined by the weight of the past, as the past passes through oneself. My Grandmother’s poetry carried the weight of colonial memory as much as it did contain all the glories of Kabyle wisdom and folklore.
When I completed the first round of field work in December 2023, I returned to the photography studios to develop my film. The positives turned out murky, or blank entirely. Just like my Grandmother’s poetry. That’s the risk that comes with shooting expired film, or approaching family with questions about things one would rather forget, or releases.
In a Western world increasingly motivated by ‘knowledge recovery’ I meditate on something my ancestors have known forever. History and stories can never be ‘decolonised’ from memory, and sometimes they get to be forgotten.
vague recollections is a happy accident, a failure content to live in the forgotten.
The failure of having no poems and no photos. The knowing that someday memory might fail me to recollect why I did any of this, who it was for, for whom it would affect the most.
There are many initiatives in institutions to ensure that cultural recovery happens, where decolonial frameworks are designed to represent the erased and marginalised humans in our living history. Yet systems of reparation are seldom undertaken, and these initiatives are launched without consideration for those who are indigenous and live closest to the trauma. Remembering hurts and being asked to remember so institutions can feel as though they can atone for history is another wound in the story.
So as my Aunt Taous said to me over and over:
Il faut oublier. We must forget.
Some knowledges are not meant for knowing. They live in the void, in the banks of the mind, where they get to fade from view. Real knowledge comes from living with the unknown as an inextricable part of existence. Knowledge emerges naturally from staying with the question. When we consciously stop to be with the unknown, we integrate and embody these voids, blanks and vague recollections. Suddenly knowledge feels safe enough to materialise in the body.
I asked myself ‘What does it feel like to not know my Grandmother’s poetry?’, and sat with the question in my body.
When I leaned into the feelings that came with the unknown: disappointment, the shame and embarrassment of what I judged to be my arrogance, and moreover the grief of being separated from my Grandmother once more, knowledge emerged.
I was liberated from the trap of wanting to know everything. I was at peace in these images. I no longer needed to study tirelessly trying to make out what something meant, or could be. I sat with the cloudy emulsion and empty data sheets as evidence of something equally crucial to remembering: forgetting.
These pictures are about an act of resistance towards knowing and institutionalised forms of ‘knowledge contribution’.
What is made present is only made more so by that which is absent. What we think we know, is only rendered visible by what we don’t know. So this work honours the joy of ‘I don’t know’. My hope is that ‘I don’t know’ becomes as safe an answer to the academic world as it is forever becoming to me.