On July 26, 2012, my grandmother died. We were very close. Two days later, as we were preparing her funeral, my grandfather asked me to photograph her on her deathbed.

I walked into the room where her body lay. Her hair had been brushed, her clothes carefully chosen. Someone had slipped a small bouquet of flowers into her hand. Her eyelids were closed, and the grey tone of her skin betrayed her final stillness.

As I photographed her face, I felt afraid, just as I have always been afraid of ghosts. As a child, I could already sense them following me through unfamiliar hallways, brushing the back of my neck, silent, invisible.

Then we buried my grandmother.

My grandfather died three years later, without ever asking to see those images, images I would stumble upon from time to time, while wandering through the chaos of my hard drives.

By chance, soon after taking those photographs, I stopped photographing altogether.

I began working as a picture editor at Le Monde, sending photographers out into the world every day. Strangely enough, that image of my grandmother became one of the last I made during the period when I was officially a photographer.

Despite this small downfall, I never truly stopped taking pictures. I did it automatically, without intention, without a project, without selecting anything.

I accumulated thousands of images: a blood-stained hand, a child, a shaft of light on a statue, a few self-portraits.

In 2022, with the birth of my daughter, something shifted. I realised that all these images, gathered over ten years, had been taken in a state of unconsciousness.

This realisation confronted me with an internal rupture: I had not stopped photographing, but I had stopped seeing.

This project arises from that fracture.

The link between image, disappearance, and memory naturally led me back to my grandmother. She was a cinephile. She was the one who introduced me to cinema, very early. One of the last films she showed me, when I was a teenager, was Spirited Away by Miyazaki (a story populated by spirits, transformations, and liminal worlds).

In Japanese tradition, some of these spirits manifest through insects. There is a saying: (虫の知らせ (mushi no shirase) / “What the insects foretell.” An intuition, a disturbance, a faint sign.

This photographic project takes place in that space: the realm of subtle yet insistent signals, of things that brush against us, that return without being called.

To our ghosts, who never truly disappear.