“Childhood memories are better, simpler, more real than adult memories – childhood memories are the only things which are real.”  Peter Bradshaw

Memory is a powerful entity that can either ruin what the mind was hiding or heal it. Memory can help us find the missing pieces of a puzzle from our past in order to live in peace within the present moment.

The project started with an interest for psychopaths and especially for their lack of emotions. With an attempt to comprehend this fascination, I created a parallelism between psychopathy and who I am as an individual to help me find the answers I’ve been looking for.

After some self-reflection, I traced it back to when I was 11 years old and learned about a major murder case that occurred in Lebanon. This happening triggered the admiration I now find within me towards psychopathy.

One of the most notable characteristics of psychopaths is that they are devoid of emotions and feel no remorse, whereas I, am a very emotional person who feels extreme remorse. Hence, I admire all that is emotionless because they depict everything that I am not, they depict lack of harmony. Whereas for me, harmony is my strength, emotions are what built me up as a person but more specifically lack of emotions were what was missing in my identity. I feel everything, I feel a lot, I feel what has yet to be felt.

This body of work is a self-healing process through a recollection of memories from my childhood. It is a combination of self-portraits and cityscapes that I shot in my hometown ‘Faraya’. All the events that took place and everyone I had encountered there, shaped my identity and made me who I am today or rather who I am not. It is a series of self-reflections upon places where I felt a lack of harmony in my life, where I felt the unfelt. I embarked on this journey of self-discovery and re-experienced what already happened to me, which led me to meditate upon these events and locations in an attempt to complete this puzzle and surmount it.

There exists a connection between memory and identity and according to John Locke, our identity begins with our earliest memories and not a moment earlier, it only reaches as far as our memory expands towards our distant past. As per this theory, what makes a person identical with himself is the remembrance of the events to which he witnessed or experienced.

Have you ever wondered what is it that makes you, you? If all your memories were to vanish, would your identity vanish with them?

Chantale Salameh