Marie Zolamian

Installation view (with Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta), Regenarate, Wiels, 2021
Route, 2018
Oil on canvas on cardboard, 12 × 18 cm (5x)
The imaginary grandparents, 2015.
Marie Zolamian’s (born in Beirut in 1975; lives and works in Liège) work takes the form of a series of sequences. Accordingly, she is building up a body of work over time, which amounts to an experimental documentary on a fictional ethnology, the experiment of self-rooting in a globalised world, which mixes lifestyles, thoughts, and stories that are both Eastern and Western. “I am trying to take ownership of the heritage of chosen communities that are foreign to me; I am questioning the concept of affiliation and belonging to a community, or a region”, says Marie Zolamian.

These “chosen exiles” in micro-localities enable me to encounter micro-stories. Their common trait is that they are based on a tale, or a testimony that affects both the individual and the group, starting from a subjective attachment to a place or an inherited object. All of this is experienced as repeated attempts at integration, in places where relationships – which are sometimes conflictual – are being established between identity, tradition, and authenticity, between a place and a culture”. The working process is developed in the course of a series of portraits, and of links between an environment and a story, regardless of whether it is individual or collective. Each portrait and each stage is the archive of a visual journey, an unknown individual here moving towards an unknown individual there.