Marginalia

Marginalia examines the narratives whose spectral presence lingers on the fringes of official histories. In this new body of work, Celia Perrin Sidarous delves into her family’s mixed heritage, with a particular focus on the fragments of memory that, akin to floaters or other optical phenomena, evade or appear tangentially within dominant narratives. Consisting of a film cycle in seven parts presented as an asynchronous diptych on two television monitors, photographic works, and a cluster of ambiguous artefacts (amphoras, shells, fruit stones and other modest morsels), Marginalia cultivates the allegorical nature of the still life genre in an installation that evokes the haptic power of objects as receptacles of memory. In the form of a delicate and personal archaeological dig, the artist’s family archives are tended to, in an attempt to reveal subtexts that exist beneath the surface. What emerges is an open-ended sequence of intersecting temporalities that takes shape in the sensorial appeal of sculptural objects in the scenic tableaux, meticulously arranged by anonymous hands and scrutinized by the eye of the camera.