Our Days of Gold. A Performative Approach to Mourning and the Re- Animation of a Photographic Archive on Social Media

<p dir="ltr"><i>In April 2016, my mother Cécile Barbiaux died suddenly in her home in Sorrento, Italy at the age </i><i>of 61. As a bereaved daughter, artist and scholar, I responded to this event by creating an artwork, </i><i>Our Days of Gold (2017-ongoing) based on my photography archive made during my years at art </i><i>school in the early 2000s. ‘Our Days of Gold’ invests social media and more specifically Instagram, </i><i>as an ongoing artwork and creative mourning strategy that performatively stages the durational </i><i>re-animation of my photographic archive for an audience of strangers, called to witness Cécile’s </i><i>life, made visible through my writing and images as @ourdaysofgold, @ourdaysofgold_film and @</i><i>ourdaysofgold_digital. My excavation of the images in the archive unfolds on multiple levels, from the </i><i>interrogation of personal memories and inscrutable past events to the examination of the meaning </i><i>of images and of the photographic archive in the context of art history and practice. Through its </i><i>activation of Instagram’s languages, communities, specific structure and affordances, Our Days of </i><i>Gold creates a virtual space for a temporal paradox, where the past becomes contemporary by being </i><i>stretched to excruciating slowness over the duration of the present, with one summer afternoon </i><i>taking over 9 months to share at the glacial pace of an image a day. Re-animation is explored through </i><i>the suspension of knowledge, and love and mourning can be shared with strangers in the present, </i><i>in “the indeterminate zone between event and image, document and monument” (Enwezor 2008).</i></p>