Memoriam is an original installation by Edouard Elias and Fanny Boucher, created especially for the WONDER LAB exhibition organised by HEART & Crafts at the National Museum of China in Beijing in 2019.

Alongside the installation, 32 héliogravures have been printed on Hahnemühle paper, in five limited editions, numbered and signed.

«MEMORIAM bears witness to an essential element of héliogravure: the relationship between artist and artisan.
A photojournalist who chose early on to focus on conflict zones, Edouard Elias decided to entrust his images to the hands of the héliograveur, as a way to give them permanence, depth, gravity, and to escape the ephemeral aspect of press photography.
For MEMORIAM, Fanny Boucher and Edouard Elias went through 97,000 of his photo negatives, stemming the entirety of his career, from its beginnings to today – searching for the “point of rupture” that Elias manages to catch in the men and women that he meets in Syria, Iraq or Bangladesh. Together they framed faces and landscapes, gestures and attitudes, lighting and materials, with the shared objective of rendering this reality timeless, of showing the universal nature of emotions by choosing expressions over time or space.
Boucher orchestrates with this installation “the meeting between the photographer’s duty of testimony and the héliograveur’s duty of remembrance».

Hélène Kelmachter, curator of the WONDER LAB exhibition