Les Moguichets
Les Moguichets marks my return to a house that has belonged to our family since the 1930s, a place I visited regularly during my childhood. 'Moguichet', an Old French word, translates to 'wasteland' and was the name of the street long ago when the area – now absorbed into the suburbs of Paris – was surrounded by fields. The poorly build house has been slowly deteriorating for years, is now cracked in countless places, and is about to collapse.
As my family prepared to part with this piece of our history, I felt drawn to revisit the house, searching for old memories and clues to the lives I could not fully understand as a child. Unoccupied and untouched for six years, the house seemed to have gently preserved traces of its departed occupants. All I could find in the enclosed and obscured remnants of this once private space was permeated with mystery, muted nostalgia and sadness – mere glimpses into past lives. Time and weather have made their mark while nature has crept in, slowly overgrowing the deceased home. The decrepitude of this microcosm only reinforced the evanescence of my hazy memories, of times that belong to us and yet slowly flee our memories, echoing the fragility of life, ultimately vanishing.