PRUNE PHI
APPEL MANQUÉ
After studies in Fine Arts and a master of Artistic Creation, Theory and Mediation, Prune Phi completed a one-year residency at the Birmingham Institute of Arts and Design in the United Kingdom and then entered the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie of Arles from which she graduated in 2018. Prune Phi completed an installation work made with photographs, drawings, collages, collected documents, texts, and videos. She staged and questioned the mechanisms of transmission within families and communities.
Her search for identity has lead Prune Phi to create a dialogue between the testimonies of the third generation of Franco-Vietnamese living in Toulouse and the knowledge on scientists on how the memory is conveyed, forgotten and even denied. Her though process is based on the reappropriation of histories of families to try to reveal the memory traces left by the ancestors who contributed to the invention of the Self.
She is interested in the physical traits that persist or, on the contrary, are diluted from one generation to the next, in the modifications of the body and its anomalies. In other works, she collects and cross-references the testimonies of several generations of Vietnamese immigrants and exiles on the uncertain memory of their common history and the fictional dimension attached to it. She tries to reveal, through these different works, the memory marks that participate in the construction and invention of each person.