Dieuwertje Hehewerth: This letter-writing, paired with the focus on clothes, makes the research focus on, and work through, ephemeral forms. They are objects that have a transitory quality – a quality of carrying and covering – of existing as an in between. I’m curious if you see these relations? And more directly in relation to the project, what it is about these ephemeral objects/forms that catch your attention? What have you learned by exploring these mediums as a way to remember and engage?
Renée Turner: It is precisely the ephemerality that fascinates me. Like the body, Gisèle’s clothes will turn to dust, photographs taken to preserve memories will fade, or lose relevance, simply because those represented are no longer remembered. But there are always echoes. I thought often of Virginia Woolf’s line in To the Lighthouse where she says: “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned.” I think by going into the intimate space of her closet, I imagined her figure. And I say imagined, because there is always an element of fiction in remembering, especially with things you have never known.
Read the full interview here.