I, You, We: The Big Album
With the residents of nursing homes.
At the Résidence du Duc d’Aumale and Lefebvre-Blondel-Dubus nursing homes in Gaillefontaine.
In the spring of 2021.
In the spring of 2021, Antoine Seiter and Valeria Monaldi regularly traveled between the nursing homes in Aumale and Gaillefontaine, in Seine-Maritime, with the intention of creating a large-format album based on images, words, and stories collected at each of these two locations. I, you, us, the large album. That’s roughly the order in which things unfolded: 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 do so to introduce themselves in turn.
This correspondence unfolded through conversations, sometimes one-on-one (a tu per tu), where words were exchanged. These words gave rise to the first images of the grand album. Connections between people and places emerged, gradually revealing the contours of a territory where everyone’s lives had, at some point, intersected.
Antoine Seiter, a photographer and graphic designer, and Valéria Monaldi, a lecturer and researcher in arts and language, worked together to create this large-scale journal, where archival images are juxtaposed with contemporary photographs, linked by the transcribed testimonies of the residents.
As part of the “Culture and Health – Medical-Social” initiative, in partnership with ARS and DRAC Normandy.
