“My mother died suddenly,” a certain Marie wrote to me. Of material, I only have his volcanic color cup. When I open my closet and it’s on the shelf, I say hello to Mother. I drink from the same cup as her. »
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Since Saturday, I’ve received several emails from readers sharing their thoughts on the “What’s Left of Us?” column. “, in which I leaned on the fate of the objects which one leaves behind oneself, with its death.
You have touched me so much with your testimonies that I would like to share some of them. It’s not true that your wisdom is going to stay in my inbox…
The weight of objects
“What I have left of my father is a Starfrit scale,” Pascale Cécyre told me. When he came to spend two or three days at home and baked bread, he liked to be able to weigh his flour. Since his death in 2010, I have taken care of this scale. If it were to stop working, I would be unspeakably sad. »
Incredible how an ordinary object can encapsulate all the love that we devote to a lost being. A scale like a presence.
Moreover, Paul Lemay wrote to me to track me towards the Montreal artist Raphaëlle de Groot and her production cycle The weight of objects (2009 to 2016).
Oh, what a great discovery!
For years, the artist has asked individuals to part with an object so that she can bear its weight. She delivered them in a way, in the context of multiple performances and installations.
Among the submissions: several items that belonged to a former flame and an astonishing number of trophies!
“I’m very interested in blind spots in art,” Raphaëlle de Groot explained to me. This led me to work on the question of leftovers: the scraps and debris next to the final work. I wanted to transpose that to our life. What are the remains of our lives? Basically, it’s those hidden items in the wardrobe. Those who bother us with their emotional charge. »
One of the first women to fight in the Canadian Armed Forces, for example, left him her right boot. Thanks to Raphaëlle de Groot, this boot has rubbed shoulders with several other shoes that have marked history, including that of Napoleon, behind a display case at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
“People sometimes gave up on themselves by offering me their object,” the artist told me. Other times they valued it again. »
For example, a young woman bequeathed a red telephone cord to Raphaëlle de Groot. This thread, which was lying around in a drawer, is the one she used to play with when her father called her to say “good night”, long ago. The artist plugged it into an old beige telephone which had belonged to a man. It was through his handset that he learned of the death of his parents, his best friend and a cousin…
“I connected the red cord of love to the phone of bad news,” Raphaëlle de Groot explains to me. What call could we receive now? Have we short-circuited the thread of things? »
The future
In her email, a woman named Johanne explained to me that her father was from a generation for which goods were scarce. Unlike him, she had been able to accumulate the objects and keep them “in case she or those around her needed them”. But it’s quite different for his children… They prefer activity to possession.
“The younger generation considers that we keep our things too long, with good reason. What will they do with our houses? she asks herself.
This is precisely the question that Lucie Thibault asks herself.
A few years ago, her older sister died of a brain tumor. Her nieces offered to pick up some items from her apartment: “I went there thinking of a scene from the movie Zorba the Greek, where the women of a small village rush into the house of a person who has just breathed his last to “loot” everything… I quickly chased away this horrible image, telling myself that Hélène would be very happy that I give a second life to his clothes. That I would wear them with pride, keeping in mind the memory of this magnificent person who was my Big Sister. Since then, I have thought of putting prizes under each of my valuable objects to facilitate the heavy task that my sons will have when I leave. »
I forwarded these testimonies to Raphaëlle de Groot. She confirmed to me that Quebecers of the oldest generations had a different relationship with objects, which could cause some headaches for their successors.
“Perhaps some kids won’t mind throwing everything in the trash, while others will see it as meaningless. If they want to be consistent with their mother’s Work — that of keeping everything, because it can be useful — they will have to find a use for her possessions. »
What doesn’t help, according to the artist, is the lack of rites of passage. With her practice, Raphaëlle de Groot hopes to give us ideas: “Perhaps it can inspire people to find honorable ways to dispose of the objects of their loved ones while giving them a personal meaning. »
“We all have stories that we will never write, we only hope that those who participated in them will remember them on occasion…” André Poulin wrote me nicely.
I like the idea of letting the objects slip away so that they can tell their story. So that their encounter with other articles generates discussions and that mourning becomes talkative…
“Until proof to the contrary, being a ‘good memory’ for someone is pretty much the best we can hope for…”, believes Michel T.
Or, in the words of Jean-François Couture: “Finally, perpetuity, would that only be the continuation of the chain of memory?” »
You make me think and you write well. Thanks for all that.