Mémoire D'Un Voyage En Oceánie

François Deschamps

Published by PhotoForum in collaboration with the Elam Printing Research Unit, 1995

ISBN 0959781846

210 x 150mm, 96 pages, softcover.

“In 1994, I was invited to produce a book at the Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University in New Zealand. At the time, I had been working on a book about the idea of change through revolution and violence, based on a 1991 trip to Cuba. I was developing a narrative through multiple voices (a psychiatrist, a professor, and a revolutionary): the idea was intriguing to me, but the subject seemed inappropriate to a South Pacific publication. So I began creating a fictitious memoir which would have been written in 1914 by a South Seas expedition photographer on the yacht Curioddity. This expedition was led by an evil German sausage maker, Ernst Schlotte, who represents all that is vicious in Western civilization. His prurient interest in cannibalism culminates in himself partaking of this taboo activity. This narrator/photographer, who by a strange coincidence bears my name, is marooned by Schlotte on one of the remote Kermadec Islands only to be eventually found by a World War II military convoy and brought to Auckland. This explains why the book is produced in New Zealand from the (fictitious) Auckland Institute archive. The story is presented as a facsimile reproduction of the journal along with scholarly research by a Maori professor. An epilogue by the nurse who took care of Mr Deschamps completes the narrative”.

François Deschamps