Autodafé – 2018 (55 x 40 cm)

It is a few meters-high installation. It is made of doll houses, its base is burnt, darkened by the fire.
This project echoes migrants’ reality who have had to flee their homes. Their home is the first material thing they have to abandon or loose. The doll house is a projection of their real homes. It is the image of an ideal imposed on children, almost an archetype that marks adults’ memory: an “engramme”. We associate this toy with childhood happiness but it is also the symbol of safety, privacy and the recognition of a person as a citizen. This is where the rejection of homeless people and migrants in our societies comes from.

This projection is an illusion of home. It is destroyed by fire: the public burning of doll houses. Visitors will see the remains of the public sentence of an object that encompasses a history of archetypes. Public burnings have a strong meaning in our history: forbidden books were burnt because they were symbols of a society that was rejected at the time. Dolls houses represent what is currently happening in Europe. The destruction by fire illustrates the dramatic situation some people are experiencing: children migrants have to give up their childhood and adults have to give up their homes.