I baked an archive for you:

home-movies, celebrations and other bittersweet memories

Home-movies are fictions that families bake to celebrate and remember. Birthdays and weddings are filmed as a type of recorded performance. Filming is a form of celebrating. The domestic camera creates the event, as much as it records it. Archiving, collecting, curating the images we produce of ourselves is a generative gesture – a homemade montage.

Found footage, recycled cinema, detournement, collage, cinema amateur, appropriation film, anthropophagy, refers to different practices of appropriation of material made by others to create new meanings, displacing images and sounds from their original context, a re-signification through montage for alternative readings. Found footage films appropriate family tapes and give them a place in film history.  

I believe home-movies to be relevant as a collective experience and memory, a shared sense of pain and death, love and celebration. Through the wounds in the stories told by others, we see our own traumas and social violences, and they can therefore function as a catalyst for the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

My practice investigates the marks that historical events leave in our personal lives. In what sense do home-videos allow us to talk about political events in society? How do we have a personal approach to material made by others? How to find us reflected back in these damaged and forgotten images?

Jaar

2025