France, 1996
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Where are you really from?
My collection process all started with the question: “where are you really from?” which is a question I often had to face for as long as I can remember. This question confronted me with the fact that despite saying that I am French people didn’t always see me as so. I often had to explain what people actually wanted to know: where my colour is from.
I would have to explain that my mother is French and that my father is from Jamaica. That my mother is white and that my father is black. A question about where I am from ended up being about my parents.
This collection is a longer answer to that question. It is my way of answering to that question with more details. Because it is a tricky subject that requires more explaining than a few words about a city or a colour. It’s about me wearing the clothes my mother used to wear at my age, it’s about my dad telling me about Jamaica, it’s about me having no memory of a place people see as being half of who I am. It is about my parents and their stories, stories they have been telling me, my mother’s second hand clothes and my father’s stories: my second hand memories.
It all started about my ethnicity, and one of the traits of being part of an ethnicity comes with how you look, your physical appearance. So, I decided talk about the two individuals that made that skin. Because the question: “where are you really from” is about that. It’s about how I don’t look like I belong.
I feel like this is where I am from.
A woman that had thirteen black turtlenecks and a man that hardly went back to where he is from.
