peyi manman, au pays des mères
France
2025
This series originates from a gesture: on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, the artist’s mother gave her an album that looks back at four decades of her life, from her humble childhood in Guadeloupe to her daily life as a young woman newly arrived in France in the 70s. The photographic story continues into the early 2000s.
Now, Emeline Amétis also photographs her mother’s native archipelago as what seems to her to be a land of hiding places, marked by violence and unpredictability.
Through the use of archives, textile, installation, portrait and landscape photography, the series creates a tension between imagination, memory and loss. It questions legacy in the Caribbean migration context: how does the imagination fill the gaps created by distance, oblivion and silence?
peyi manman [in the land of mothers] draws the attention to a story shared by many Caribbean matrilinear families and offers a spatial, historical and spiritual journey.
Portfolio
About the artist
Born in 1992, Emeline Amétis is a French-Caribbean visual artist. Her hybrid work as an archivist artist questions the complex relationship that we may have with a rich and traumatic history, countries and multiple identities. Emelie Amétis is taking part in Nouvel Œil, the mentoring programme for women photographers initiated in 2024 by Gaze Magazine.