Photographic investigation has become, by force of circumstance and events, the form that Rebecca Topakian has adopted. As far back as 2014, in Jericho, she was documenting the mystery of the city known as the oldest in the world; in response to ancestral tales, she amassed photographic clues, temporal ellipses bringing together within the frame of the image the symbolic and the trivial, immemorial times and the present of the encounter. Since then, she has set out to tell a more personal story: that of her Armenian family, exiled from Turkey as a result of persecution. To tackle the dense, traumatic material of this long-silenced family history, she first turned to fiction. With Dame Gulizar And Other Love Stories (2017-2019), her starting point is the love story of her grandparents. From the knightly features of the story as it came to her, she drew the main lines of a narrative borrowing from mythology, the form of which already combines family archives and shots taken in Armenia. In 2021, the artist began Il faut que les braises de Constantinople s'envolent jusqu'en Europe, this time embracing the whole of her family history. With a single artistic gesture, she gathered together the scattered snippets - rare documents and sparse accounts - and took them there to perhaps, if not repair the family history, at least repair its narrative and by extension contribute to restoring the narrative of the Armenian genocide. Her genealogical research takes her to Istanbul, Talas in Anatolia, in the traces of her family's village, and leads her to cross paths with Armenians in present-day Turkey. The photographs are accompanied by short texts that, like the photographs themselves, are devoid of pathos and focus on the reality that is there, on what persists: the youth, a stele engraved in a cemetery, and despite history, racist flags and tags in the streets and on the walls of villages that have already been devastated. Patiently, the artist continues his work, recording, assembling and maintaining the embers of memory.
After studying philosophy and geography, Rebecca Topakian (1989) turned to photography. A 2015 graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles, she is based in Paris and a resident of the Poush! Manifesto workshops.
