The firstnames list

Here, everything starts,

the blast of your name…

Transfigured face, moving images covered by fog and night drizzle.

They, all in one, were a mask, a scream.

Parcaes. Olenka Carrasco. The firstnames list

In the midst of the city noise, I hold my camera, and in the endless succession of names I remember hers.

That name that contains so many others : A n t o n i a, the name of my mother.

This is where this work begins.

Triptyque. Antonia left arms. Olenka Carrasco. The firstnames list.

Triptyque. The name, Antonia. Olenka Carrasco. The firstnames list.

Triptyque. Antonia right arms. Olenka Carrasco. The firstnames list.

Olenka Carrasco in her solo exhibition The firstnames list. Nia Diedla

La liste de prénoms (The firstnames list) is a photography, narrative and art project presented as an installation, most of the time accompanied by a performance.

It is a work that starts in 2016 in the city of Paris. The project talks about a social phenomenon that seems to be widespread in the media but which continues to grow: domestic violence, not in a documentary way, but rather as a narration of mourning, of an encounter with traumatic memory; it is the story of the witness who decides to cry out against oblivion.

The complete project consists of a photo-text series, several drawings that are installed to form part of the walls and exhibition space, a reproduction of a family dining table and handwritten firstnames lists.

Each time La Liste de Prénoms is exhibited, it transforms and adapts to the exhibition space, always recreating a unique montage. It is also a collaborative project for the community that visits it.

The first chapter of the project, Le cri dans le vide (A scream into the void), is inspired by Paris surroundings’ amateur dance group: ARTivisme. The ARTivists organize interventions and performances in the street by taking back the public space to denounce the violence suffered by women, street harassment, and other themes related to the feminist fight, in one of the French regions with the highest rates of femicides, street harassment or domestic violence: Seine-Saint-Denis. Most of them were victims themselves. They work actively with associations that help women to fight for their condition. I went to meet this troop, and i was fascinated by the great capacity of resiliation that the victims of gender violence experiment in the performance. While taking pictures of their process, I found myself with a forgotten intimate story, printed on the web of my child’s memory. This memory exercise inspired the second chapter of the project: Le souvenir, l’histoire de Maman (The memory, Mum’s story).

The photography is strongly influenced by Provoke and the characters in each image seem to come out of Francisco de Goya’s Caprices and other engravings. The texts are part of a diary that had never been written before and whose words begin to dig a dialogue with the images.