“Bye Bye Memory” explores the fragility of memory and the unexpected ways in which it endures. Drawing on a photographic moment captured during her travels around the world—and more specifically in the Caribbean—Gaëlle Choisne assembles images as visual notes, fragments of thought, and sources of inspiration. These photographs, taken during her travels, reflect a focus on encounters, landscapes, details, and ordinary situations that make up a sensory experience of the world.

The work effect a shift: the image, typically destined for rapid circulation, oblivion, or erasure, is here transferred onto marble, a material associated with permanence, monuments, and commemoration. This act creates a tension between the ephemeral and the enduring. The fragment of existence depicted—intimate, subjective, sometimes trivial—takes on the presence of a contemporary memorial.

The slightly translucent print reveals the marble’s natural veining beneath the image. These mineral lines traverse the photograph just as time traverses memory: they disrupt its legibility, sometimes fragmenting it, but also anchoring it in a material depth. The material thus becomes an active participant in the work, bringing its own geological history into the very heart of the image.

What might have vanished in the ceaseless flow of images becomes a trace, a remnant, and a testimony. Yet the memory it evokes remains unstable: it transforms, cracks, and reassembles itself with the passage of time, through narratives, and through different perspectives. Marble does not guarantee the preservation of the past; rather, it reveals our desire to hold on to what slips away from us.

Through *Bye Bye Memory*, Gaëlle Choisne elevates the lived moment to the status of a monument and transforms her personal photographic archives into spaces of collective resonance. These travel images, initially conceived as visual notebooks, become witnesses to a memory in motion, where individual experience engages with broader narratives of circulation, displacement, and transmission.

The work thus invites reflection on how we construct our own emotional archives: modest monuments built from ordinary moments, where memory survives less as a fixed truth than as a sensitive, persistent, and ever-evolving presence. Between image and stone, between erasure and permanence, *Bye Bye Memory* opens up a space where memory reveals itself as much in what appears as in what remains buried.

Second step in the construction of the Monument aux Vivant-e-s by artist Gaëlle Choisne after CHOC, DÉNI associates the Aquarium to the unconscious, seat of this phase of the grieving process.

Several generations of men and women who became slaves were transported, traded, humiliated and mutilated, mistreated, killed without burial and died without a name. How to mourn?

The stage of Denial induces an unconscious, hidden dimension that we are not ready to see. The Tropical Aquarium becomes the privileged metaphorical place of the unconscious to develop this aspect of mourning. Located in the basement of the Palace, the Aquarium recalls the unconscious and subterranean dimensions of the human being as well as the shadowy parts of the being.

Here, the artist presents denial, the moment when it is difficult to become aware of what has happened. This phase of mourning is materialized by a series of engraved shells (reminiscent of those used in the West Indian trade) scattered in the aquariums of the Palais. The words and phrases inscribed are taken from a poem by Édouard Glissant from the collection Le Sel noir (1983). Some of the messages are directed towards the fish, others are visible to all.

Fourth step in the construction of the Monument aux Vivant-e-s by artist Gaëlle Choisne, FESTIVAL DÉPRESSION mixes cinema, music and performance to address the « mental decompression » caused by the violence suffered by racialized people.

In the grieving process, depression is the troubled moment of latency when one has no strength or hope. « Depression » also refers to the idea of decompression. For Gaëlle Choisne, the denunciation of the « generalized state of depression » among certain racialized people, linked to racism and the injustices they face, leads to a beginning of mental decompression.

In the Forum, the artist invites to a kind of collective care performed, thanks to the music and the word of her guests.

Gaëlle Choisne pays homage to the Haitian composer Carmen Brouard through her work And the sea says nothing, a silent film game, accompanied by musicians Lutxi Nesprias and Julen Zelaia who play La sonate vodouesque.
On the stage work Rainbow Tears, author and actress Jo Güstin celebrates black and queer culture by taking the audience on a journey through its legends. Ndayé Kouagou, artist and performer, follows her with an enigmatic performance based on his writings on discomfort, power and vulnerability.