Chambre 207 in Dakar

On August 5, 1983, while stopping for the night with his family on their way to a vacation destination, Jean-Michel André’s father was murdered along with six other people at a hotel in Avignon. The case was never fully solved, but the investigation did reveal that the motive was an attempted robbery that escalated into a massacre.

jean-Michel André, who was seven years old at the time of the events, was sleeping that night in a room adjoining his father’s. In shock, he lost his memory. Thirty years later, the artist embarks on a personal quest, poring over archives, collecting documents, returning to the scene, and attempting to piece together the fragments of a story that had long remained out of reach.

As the truth slips away, Jean-Michel André shifts his gaze. He revisits and photographs the landscapes he has traveled through—or might have traveled through with his father: Avignon, Arles, Corsica, Germany, where his father worked for the State Department, as well as Senegal, where the artist spent part of his early childhood.

Combining photographs, investigative material, press archives, and family mementos, Chambre 207 takes the form of a visual essay on memory, mourning, and healing. Far from the sensational and the melodramatic, Jean-Michel André’s work explores the limits of the image: what can be shown, how, why, and for whom? How can one share an intimate story without confining it to a personal narrative, but rather by opening it up to a more universal experience?

The exhibition is as much a reenactment as it is a reconstruction. Through its poetry and restraint, it transports us into a suspended state of time, between the before and after of that night in room 207. It highlights a quest for truth that, little by little, transforms into an act of healing.

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↘︎ Curating: Mohamed Amine Cissé

↘︎ Credits: an exhibition co-produced with the Institut français in Paris, the Institut français in Senegal, the Mediterranean Center for Photography in Bastia, and the Institut pour la photographie in Lille. A photography project carried out with the support of the National Center for Visual Arts, the Hauts-de-France Region, and the Mediterranean Center for Photography in Bastia.