How does a community become memory?

A community is not formed solely through what it shares in the present. It is also shaped by what it chooses to preserve, what it transmits, what it transforms, and sometimes what it attempts to rescue from oblivion.

FAIRE COMMUN brings together Naïla Salmi, Pablo Ricchetti and Lucas Giraud-Bouraoui / PRINCE, three practices that, through different media and experiences, examine the ways in which individual memory can become collective.

Photographs, paintings, texts, textiles and jewellery come together here as a constellation of traces. Some originate in images captured from everyday life; others emerge from family histories, inherited territories or transmitted gestures. All raise the same question: at what point does an experience cease to belong to the individual and become part of a shared history?

In Naïla Salmi’s work, photography, poetry and textile converge in a practice shaped by questions of belonging, displacement and transmission. The image sometimes leaves its conventional support to inhabit fabric — a supple, shifting material intimately connected to the body. Between lived and inherited territories, her works reveal a memory that circulates across places, generations and narratives.

With Jeunesse Parisienne, Pablo Ricchetti begins with ordinary images, captured in the moment and destined to disappear within the digital flow. By translating them into oil paintings, he alters their temporality: evenings, friendships, demonstrations, bodies and gestures belonging to a generation acquire the duration of painting. What once belonged to the fleeting image becomes a trace; what appeared anecdotal begins to form the memory of a group.

For Lucas Giraud-Bouraoui, founder of PRINCE, transmission takes place through the object and through gesture. His jewellery, designed in dialogue with Amazigh culture and produced in collaboration with Tuareg silversmith Ibrahim Khamed Rissa, brings contemporary creation into conversation with inherited craftsmanship. Jewellery is no longer simply an ornament: worn on the body, it becomes a sign, an inheritance and a form of memory in circulation.

To make common does not mean erasing singularities, nor does it mean producing a single history. It means allowing distinct experiences to encounter one another, to be transmitted, and gradually to form a shared language.

The exhibition therefore considers community not as a fixed form, but as an ongoing process. A community takes shape through the images we preserve, the stories we tell, the objects we wear, the gestures we learn and those we pass on.

Perhaps memory does not exist before the common: it emerges precisely at the moment when something passes from one person to another.