The Ten Thousand Things – Family Album I, II, III, IV (2026)

Family Album I (150 × 200 cm)
Family Album II, III and IV (70 × 100 cm)
Archival photographs from 1983, digitally altered, enlarged, printed on PVC fabric and mounted on LED lightboxes..

For this work, I used the Clean Up tool in my digital photo library and asked it to remove all the heads from the photographs. What fascinated me was that the tool is programmed in such a way that it can only remove something by generating new information to make the image appear coherent again where the heads once were. It reminded me of what psychologist and philosopher Douwe Draaisma writes about memory: that we constantly fill the gaps in our memories with self-generated stories in order to make sense of what we cannot fully remember.