Annelise Duque: Remember Them Alive

Remember Them Alive is a series of staged tableaux where a young woman is repeatedly swarmed by reappearing hands that reach, intimidate, and console. 

The photographs, arranged as a mise en scéne (French for literally “putting on stage”), read as filmic scenes, performance stills, or narratives set and staged on the visual plane. For UMOCA Artist-in-Residence Annelise Duque, these staged photographs, with their multiple invading hands, tell a story of personal loss and familial relationships. Drawing on stories from her inherited history and instructions from garden catalogs, Duque (re)animates both real and fabricated memories. As such, the photos function as phantom performances of the gestures and routines of the women who came before her—an accumulation of her grandmothers, aunts, sisters, mother. Through the performance, she becomes the swarm itself.