"Good artists no longer have lives to themselves, only the impulse to tell what they feel to be their own stories."
The outstanding contemporary artist Christian Boltanski renounces painting in search of his lost childhood by fabricating his past in an act of self-anthropology. Boltanski's works, made from a wide variety of materials (cardboard boxes, found objects, clothing), stand at the crossroads of photography, writing, and installation. The artist developed the concept of "individual mythology" to present his works, which echo his questions about memory, forgetting, and absence, proposing a back and forth between intimate and collective history. Whether he presents these objects in the form of showcases, archives, storage, or simply exhibitions, he situates them all in space and time. Each object takes us back to the past in its own way: the personal past, real or fictional, dramatic or comic, that of the artist, of an object, or all humanity. They are relics.