Close your eyes and think of someone you know well. Imagine his or her face. Delineate the eyebrows, the lips, the color of the irises and hair. Make concrete the shape of his or her nose, the size of the pupils, the prominence of cheekbones. Imagine him or her gaze, the way he or she holds his or her head… Individuality remains even when we cannot recollect every aspect of the person we are thinking of, and yet, we could recognize him or her anywhere, at any time. What is what we remember then? Memory delves into the decomposition of the portrait through time, saved by the ability of our brain to reconstruct what is missing to a certain limit. But what happens when the subject lacks identity and yet it is (was) an individual? When does the trace of a person become no more than that? What demarcates the boundary beyond which memory fails? Can we know who unknown people, made real by the photograph, really were? Memory presents portraits that decompose in our gaze - literally by the interference of images of our brains - and asks us (the subjects ask us) to desperately reconstruct them, to preserve their identity and personhood. But we can only imagine it, revealing identity for what it really is: true fiction.
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