22 01.2026 | Mother–daughter and invisible lineages

Delphine d'Elia

as part of Photo Brussels 2026

Are we still connected to those who have passed away?
Can we rewrite our family narrative through their memory?

Drawing on photographs spanning five generations, this approach seeks to repair fractures and to create a dialogue with the absent. Through superimpositions of negatives and cyanotype prints, impossible encounters emerge: a great-grandmother appears at a birthday celebration, three generations of mothers come together, and an adolescent meets her future as a mother. The pictures blend together into soft blue tones that make their contours less clear. Family photography thus becomes a site of post-mortem memory, revealing silences, fractures, absences, and ghosts. A new memory is born from these imaginary weavings and is made tangible by absence itself.

Delphine d’Elia
Delphine lives and works in Brussels. A cultural mediator in the performing arts, she has been an artist at TinyGallery since 2023. Her work explores the layers of memory through family photographic archives, particularly old photographic plates that she reactivates to question lineage, absence, and transmission. TinyGallery artist member since 2023.