Fascinated by a box of negatives she bought at a market in Berlin, a woman tries to make out the motifs. Through the shadows and contrasts, she looks for signs that would enable her to date them, and in them she makes out the silhouette of another woman, whose existence she imagines: that of someone who grew up under the Nazi regime, formatted by this ideology of “normality” and performance.
But alongside this reflection on social conditioning, on the value of images and what they produce and transmit, there is a questioning of the narrator’s own trajectory: why was she drawn to this woman and these photographs? Wasn’t she herself considered “different”, incapable of interacting with others? If dictatorships are notorious for forcing individual trajectories in the name of a higher ideal, are contemporary societies exempt from criticism when it comes to the categorisations they create and the methods they impose? In the course of this twofold historical and sensitive investigation, Sandra de Vivies tracks down trajectories perceived as unconventional and questions the possibilities of their existence.
