Photographer Fabienne Gil Paradeis is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘THE SPAIN OF MY CHILD’. To see Fabienne ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

What remains of a country one leaves behind for future generations? Spain hasexperienced several waves of migration, famine, unemployment, and the civil war forced people to leave their homes in search of a better future.

My maternal lineage bears the mark of this exile, of grandparents who, in 1920, made the decision to cross the Pyrenées.

I knew my grandmother lived in a neighborhood where Spanish exiles had recreated their own little Spain. When I was a child, visiting there delighted me. I felt immersed in that atmosphere, lulled by the musicality of the language.

However, people spoke to me in French. I was there, and they were elsewhere. A phrase I was often told as a child came back to me, one that referred to my extreme shyness: “Well then, have you lost your tongue?”

I never learned to speak Spanish.

Leaving the past behind, no longer speaking of it, integrating, these were unspoken rules.

Time stood still; memory split into two worlds, two timelines. I grew up with this divided legacy, which shattered my sense of continuity and erected an insurmountable barrier. With this project, however, I crossed the Pyrenees once more and discovered Aragon. I then took a multitude of photographs, as if I wanted to take everything with me.

Extracting myself from this profusion was a turning point. Putting reality at a distance opened up the possibility for me to represent it. It is within the very body of the photograph that I sought to reinterpret the world in which I grew up. I was able to blur the linear perception of time, as well as that of two divided territories, in favor of tangible fiction.

These diverse approaches gave rise to hybrid photographic objects, handcrafted, which brought depth to this anonymous part of my history. I cut out my family, giving life to small, solidified figures so they could stand upright, survivors of exile.

I transported them, I placed them here and there in Aragon, and photographed them. I tore, erased, and scraped, actions that spoke to my history and resulted in new narrative proposals. I broke down an inner landscape to rebuild it; I then glued, combined, and assembled. These choices position these images in a rejection of a purely documentary and illustrative dimension of reality. Once cut out, moved, and assembled, these archival photographs lose their original meaning and appear imbued with heightened expressive power, clothed in buried emotions. The material allowed me to inhabit my photographs, to experience them, to appropriate them, and to see the void transform into flesh.

Removed from their intimate context, these photographic prints open up to a collective memory and pose questions that resonate with the effects of exile for subsequent generations, when the people who they themselves experienced this uprooting and are no longer here to tell their story.

This narrative reveals the traces of my connection to exile, to Spain, and creates the matrix for a transformation of the past into the present, as well as a new territory that is neither Spain nor France, but l’Espagne de mon enf(r)ance.

Fabienne Gil Paradeis lives and works in Bordeaux. Her professional work as a psychologist resonates with her photographic practice, and vice versa. She uses photography with the vulnerable populations she works with, offering them a tool to express their overflowing sensitivity. Photographic mediation thus becomes a powerful vehicle for healing and self-discovery. « La fabrique d’images » is one of the projects developed in close collaboration with the people she meets.

Several workshops, in Arles and elsewhere, with various photographers including Klavdij Sluban, have allowed her to define a path and find the form for her work.

Her style gives ample space to the emergence of what lies beneath the surface. It is grounded in a narrative underpinned by the intimate. She enriches her body of work with visual interventions, manipulating the images to create a material that bridges form and content. Her approach revolves around themes such as memory, absence, generational transmission, exile, psychological fragility, and the unthought. Full Bio.