Nathyfa Michel

My work is an act of remembrance: it creates a space for what has been lost, observes what remains, and charts paths toward what can be reinvented. It is rooted in a diasporic and multicultural experience: growing up between Guiana and France confronted me with the fractures of identity, inherited silences, and power imbalances that cross the transmission of memories.
I explore personal and collective memories in an attempt to decolonize my cultural legacies. I work from zones of absence, rupture, and silence to find a visual language capable of inhabiting these in-between spaces. My practice seeks to bring forth sensitive narratives where official history—whether familial or institutional—remains silent, by restoring what has been forgotten or erased. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines photography, installation, writing, and performance, I claim slowness as a way of creating.
I experiment with archives, digital and film photography, which I combine with collage or alternative processes such as chlorophyll printing and cyanotypes. These gestures allow me to explore the tensions between presence and absence, and to give tangible form to the intertwining of multiple narratives, in which truth and identity are subjective and polyphonic. I ground my practice in specific environments, seeking a dialogue with invisible presences, in order to access other forms of transmission and reopen new pathways for the circulation of buried memories.