In this artistic research project, I explore how speculative biographies and the reuse of colonial images can support processes of repair, decolonial interpretation, and the development of personal and collective freedom. I work with artists and scholars from Troubled Archives and partner organisations to design participatory workshops and audiovisual experiments with small audience groups.

The project starts with figures from the The Recognition Machine database. We seek ways to process the shared trauma of colonisation and being colonised, beginning in separate groups, coloniser and colonised, and gradually moving toward mixed group encounters. The aim is to foster empathy, dialogue, and mutual recognition while creating space for alternative heroic narratives, focusing on the heroism of everyday people rather than military monuments, following on from the project New Heroin.e.s.

Central to this work is the Mizrahian concept of l’être libre, a form of freedom tied to the recognition of happiness as essential to human existence, and the inner reflection it requires. Through audiovisual methods and collective experimentation, the project develops new ways of remembering, imagining, and repairing the legacies of the past.