EXHIBITION

Burn from Absence by Emeline Courcier is a meditation on memory, silence, and the fragile threads that bind generations together. Drawing from her Vietnamese family’s experience of displacement and their philosophy of erasing the past to build resilience, Courcier uses artificial intelligence (AI) as both tool and metaphor. The work unfolds as a four-channel video installation in which AI-generated imagery reconstructs memory fragments that have been lost, denied, or deliberately forgotten, like growing up in Vietnam, the impact of the Indochina wars, family dynamics, and the escape to Paris.

Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for archives, Courcier highlights its instability, the way it blurs fact and fiction, truth and illusion. The faces and recollections reinterpreted by the machine bear traces of forgery, reminding us that every act of remembering is also an act of reinterpretation. Through this tension, Burn from Absence questions what it means to inherit silence, to bear witness to what has been erased, and to create new spaces where memory can be re-enacted.

At once deeply personal and universally resonant, the work reveals the long shadow of trauma while affirming the necessity of storytelling. By confronting the act of forgetting, Courcier suggests that memory is not only what we preserve, but also what we choose to reconstruct. Burn from Absence invites us to consider how technology can serve as an instrument of healing, unearthing what has been silenced, and opening possibilities for dialogue between past and present.

The work received the Special Mention for Digital Storytelling at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2024.

The presentation of Burn from Absence by Emeline Courcier is part of a partnership between PHI and Place des Arts, established in 2021 to enhance access to immersive content for a wider audience, free of charge.

Programmed by: Myriam Achard, PHI