Hanging Childhood

The series Hanging Childhood originates from a process of revisiting analog photographs taken at different moments in the artist’s life. What initially appeared as simple private memory gradually becomes a broader field of observation: a reflection on the condition of childhood when it is looked at from a distance, through time.
The title immediately introduces an ambiguous tension. “Hanging” suggests suspension and waiting, but also fragility and precariousness. Childhood does not appear here as a stable state or as something nostalgically celebrated, but rather as something momentarily held within the space of memory, as if it could oscillate between presence and disappearance.
The images portray children caught in moments of stillness: sleep, fatigue, silent observation, floating in water, resting on an adult’s lap. In these situations the child’s body is not represented through movement or play, but through states of abandonment and suspension. Childhood thus appears as a fragile and exposed condition, often unaware of the world that surrounds it.
Some photographs introduce a perceptual distance: a face observed through a beaded curtain, a blurred figure in front of the sea, a direct gaze that oscillates between challenge and vulnerability. These elements suggest that childhood, when remembered or observed, can never be fully accessible. It always remains filtered, mediated, partially hidden.
A color image interrupts the continuity of black and white. The body of a child lying still, surrounded by red roses, introduces a more enigmatic and ritual dimension. The red of the flowers simultaneously evokes life, memory, and a subtle funerary tone. Childhood appears here as something precious but also extremely fragile, almost reliquary: a moment that exists only insofar as it is preserved and remembered.
Within this context, the figure of the adult also emerges. The body supporting a sleeping child suggests the dimension of care, but also the silent fatigue of protection. Childhood is never entirely autonomous; it always exists in relation to someone who sustains it, observes it, or remembers it.
Within this constellation of images, an apparently ordinary object becomes a symbolic key: a stuffed toy hanging from a clothesline against the open sky. Isolated from its domestic context, the object seems to transform into a small figure suspended in space. In this everyday and unintentional gesture lies the meaning of the entire series. The object of childhood is no longer used or animated by play; it remains suspended, held there like a fragment of memory.
The toy thus becomes a kind of visual relic. It does not directly represent a child, but rather what remains of childhood once it has already passed. A light, almost imperceptible trace that continues to exist within the space of memory.
Hanging Childhood therefore does not describe childhood as a stage of life, but as a condition suspended in time. The photographs do not simply document private moments; instead, they reveal how childhood can transform, through the act of looking, into a set of fragile traces: bodies, gestures, objects, and memories that remain, for an instant, hanging between what once was and what can no longer return. The photographs have intentionally not been cleaned from dust or imperfections. These marks remain as part of the images, preserving the sense of childhood as a distant and slightly distorted memory, like an old photograph resurfacing from time.
Analog photography. Variable dimensions
Edition: 2 prints + original vintage print of each image.
Variable support.