Public:
Residents in a retirement home

Location :
Retirement home Résidence du Duc d’Aumale and Lefebvre-Blondel-Dubus in Gaillefontaine

Time of intervention :
45h of photographic workshop and 20h of writing workshop

Artists :
Antoine Seiter and Valéria Monaldi (Paris)

Mediums :
Photography, writing

Devices :
Culture et santé – médico-social

Partners :
ARS, DRAC Normandie

Process:
In the spring of 2021, Antoine Seiter and Valeria Monaldi regularly traveled between the Ehpad (French retirement home) of Aumale and Gaillefontaine, in Seine-Maritime, with the intention of creating a large album made from images, words and stories collected in each of these two places. Je, tu, nous, le grand album (I, you, we, the big album). This is more or less the order in which things were done: first the “I” in the form of a letter sent by Antoine and Valeria to each resident to introduce themselves before meeting in person and inviting those who wished to introduce themselves.

This correspondence followed its course in conversations, sometimes face to face (a tu per tu) where words were exchanged. These words led to the first images of the large album. Links between people and places appeared, gradually giving us the outline of a territory where the lives of each person had, at a given moment, crossed.

Restitution :
Antoine Seiter, photographer and graphic designer, and Valéria Monaldi, lecturer and researcher in arts and language, worked together to elaborate this large diary in which archival images are combined with current shots, linked by the transcribed testimonies of residents.