Caroline makes visible the memories she never actually had
How do you remember someone you barely knew? For Caroline Schot, that question has become a lifelong search. She is graduating from the Fine Art bachelor’s programme at AKI ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design. In her installation, she explores loss, distance and the longing for connection.
Caroline Schot, De afwezigheid van herinnering, finals 2026
When Caroline was three years old, her father suddenly passed away. She has very few concrete memories of him. Yet his absence has always remained present in her life. 'My mother told me that afterwards, I constantly made drawings of him and me together. So visual language became part of who I am from a very early age.'
'I’ve always been obsessed with old photographs of him. Or photographs he took. As if those images allow me to reconstruct something of him.'
Work rooted in personal necessity
That urge to come closer to someone through images now forms the foundation of her graduation work. The Absence of Memory did not emerge from a preconceived concept, but from a personal necessity.
'For years, I stopped making work about him. But his loss runs like a thread through my life. Maybe now, at the end of my time at AKI, I felt the need to dive back into it.' A chapter Caroline wishes she could have shared with him.
A few months ago, she found a box of old slides in her mother’s attic. They had been made by her father before she was born. Opening that archive became an intimate and confronting process. 'I’ve always been obsessed with old photographs of him. Or photographs he took. As if those images allow me to reconstruct something of him.'
Between presence and absence
That desire to make tangible someone who is no longer there can literally be felt in her installation. Visitors first walk through a dark space. A kind of emptiness, a mental distance. At the end, a ceramic sculpture appears. At the same time, slides are projected through a layer of water.
The moving water continuously distorts the images. The projection then reflects onto the wall, together with the shadow of the sculpture. 'In that way, I make myself part of his image.'
By constantly translating the image again and again, from slide to water, from water to wall, a distance from the original emerges. For Caroline, that distortion is exactly where the core of the work lies. Not the memory itself, but the absence of it.
A memory that keeps shifting
As a result, the installation feels both deeply personal and universal. Everyone knows the desire to hold on to something that is slowly fading away. Caroline makes that feeling visible without fully resolving it. Perhaps that is exactly why the work lingers.
