Recollections are imprinted on that kind of parchment we call memory. The quickest and surest way to probe it is by way of smells; Proust knew that, and how to tell it in words. I realized it and wanted to express it by means of an image by photographing the place which, in the form of an old storeroom filled with papers, represented my childhood. The papers still retained the old smell of the tree from which they were born, as well as that of amber and all the years that imprinted their weight of dust, the smell of the ink that gave them life, my tiny fingers discovering the other realm that lives in the pages of what they tell me is called book, the smell of the cedar that was a pencil that marked the flat white paper which could be, if it passed through my father’s hands, an elephant or a giraffe. The smell of my memory is as multifaceted and complex as that of paper.

Cecilia de Val
June 2009