Nayla Dabaji in Carleton-sur-Mer

“Documentary Adrift explores the process that led to the creation of my video work Boomerang. In it, a seaside stroll brings back the memory of a conversation with a friend at dawn in the mountains; a memory that emerges little by little to then find itself imprisoned behind the screen of a newscast. The project draws its inspiration from the idea of shift, the one produced by delays in electronic transmission, owing to a sound/light gap, as well as the one that results from the updating of the past by our memory. Since 2019, and through this project, I’ve been reflecting on different approaches for staging the work process and the non-fixed state of a work. Documentary Adrift received the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, was presented at L’Imagier Art Centre in 2019 and was the subject of a sound-research residency at the Oboro artist center in Montreal in 2020. As part of the 12th Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie, the exhibit presents the project’s photographic, textual and sound elements in order to explore the memory of a conversation and in so doing generate a consideration of time, the memory, and the simultaneous.”