On August 1, 2016, the City of Paris began cleaning the statue at Place de la République. Since the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, Parisians had continued to leave flowers, pencils, photographs, candles, messages, graffiti, and other offerings at the Place de la République in response to the repeated acts of terror. At the same time, the square had also become a site for demonstrations and political expression. During the cleaning, barricades were erected around the statue to ensure the safety of the workers. From time to time, passersby would ask over the barricades, “Why are you cleaning it?” What, exactly, were they cleaning? Is it possible to erase memory? Where do our memories go? Nearly ten years have passed since those terrorist attacks. These images remind us of our own forgetting.

«Touching the Engraved Names» is a series of photographs centered around eight sites of memory in Greater Paris. It portrays women and men engaged in the ongoing effort to resist forgetting, thus out- lining a shared memory of Paris: mediators who convey the history of Mont-Valérien, passersby who pause before the memorials on Boulevard Richard Lenoir, workers building a war memorial a hundred years after the end of the First World War, children playing beside a neglected monument, archivists pre- serving fragments of our history, and a sculptor imagining a monument dedicated to Italian immigrants.

The images are placed on a piece of furniture shaped like an altar, and a photograph depicting a chrysan- themum greenhouse is hung on the wall.

The work aims to capture a memory in the making—at a time when, as Paris expands, it must also at- tempt to redefine the connection between those who live there and those who have vanished.