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In Burn from Absence, Emeline Courcier performs an act of luminous defiance against the tyranny of forgetting. Within the four-channel installation at Montreal’s Place des Arts—produced by PHI Studio—memory ceases to be a relic of the past and instead becomes an unstable terrain where ghosts demand regeneration. The work, awarded a Special Mention for Digital Storytelling at IDFA 2024, situates itself not within the lineage of documentary or experimental cinema, but rather within a metaphysical conversation about inheritance, silence, and the architectures of remembrance. Courcier’s medium—artificial intelligence—is both accomplice and adversary, a technological spirit conjured to fill the void left by generations unwilling or unable to remember.
What unfolds across the screens is not a reconstruction but a haunting. AI-generated images—grainy, tender, often disquieting—compose a phantasmic family album of a Vietnamese lineage fractured by displacement, colonial wars, and exile to Paris. The images oscillate between verisimilitude and fabrication, producing that trembling uncertainty of déjà vu: we have never seen these faces, yet they feel deeply known. The tension is generative. Courcier’s digital phantoms remind us that every archive, whether algorithmic or human, is an act of creative interpretation. To remember, she suggests, is to invent responsibly.
The work’s visual architecture—four channels encircling the spectator in a cruciform of memory—operates less as narrative space than as psychic field. Courcier’s editing, co-sculpted with Kevin Delamourd, does not follow the logic of cinema but of dreams: images emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure themselves like recollections summoned under hypnosis. The texture, meticulously distressed to mimic 35mm film grain, resists the pristine coldness of the digital. Each frame feels lived-in, weathered by absence. This deliberate degradation—this refusal of technological perfection—grounds the work in the tactile truth of loss. The artificial becomes organic through its willingness to decay.
At the core of Burn from Absence lies a radical act of shadow work. Courcier does not sanitize the trauma of her family’s history; she reenters it, unshielded, as though descending into a sacred darkness. Her process is an exercise in emotional honesty—the kind that refuses catharsis without confrontation. The AI becomes a mirror for the artist’s psyche: unstable, hallucinatory, but fertile with revelation. When the machine misrecognizes her grandmother’s face or fabricates an impossible childhood street in Laos, it exposes the fissure between remembrance and truth. In that fissure lies transformation.
The film’s structure, anchored by a tapestry of family voices, creates a counterpoint to the visual instability. Courcier’s narration intertwines with the voices of her relatives—Henri Le Hong Chau, Sophie Le Thi Hong Ngoc, Michel Le Hong Long, among others—whose memories float like spectral testimonies. The voices are uneven in clarity, at times interrupted by the static of time, as though transmitted from another dimension. This sound design by Philippe Rochefort forms the emotional architecture of the piece: it breathes, murmurs, and ultimately weeps.
What distinguishes Courcier’s work from the sentimental memorialism that often attends projects of diaspora is its refusal to present the past as intact. She understands that history is not an inheritance but a field of excavation. The act of remembering becomes, in her hands, an ethical labor—a reclamation of agency over the stories one has been denied. Through her use of AI, Courcier reclaims the technological apparatus that has historically served dominant narratives. Instead of perpetuating imperial archives, she repurposes the machine to dream her family into the frame of history. In this sense, Burn from Absence is not only a portrait of a family, but a manifesto on decolonizing the archive.
The installation demands not mere observation but participation. The viewer, enveloped in the surrounding images, is implicated in the process of reconstruction. Each audience member becomes a co-witness, their presence reanimating what has been lost. Courcier’s choice to present the work freely at Place des Arts—an act of public generosity rather than exclusivity—reinforces its communal intention. The work becomes a site of collective consciousness, a gathering where absence is not mourned but metabolized into empathy.
There is a spiritual intelligence to Courcier’s method. Her practice recalls the philosophies of Vietnamese ancestor veneration, where the dead are never fully gone but continue to shape the moral and emotional topography of the living. The opening scene—a recreated family dinner where laughter mingles with the awareness of empty chairs—renders this worldview palpable. The dead are present as silence, as gaps in the table’s geometry. This evocation of ritual intimacy is not nostalgic; it is regenerative. Courcier invites the viewer to commune with absence not as void, but as fertile ground for renewal.
Thematically, Burn from Absence converges with the writings of writers like Hélène Cixous and Édouard Glissant, who conceive identity as a poetics of relation—a weaving of visible and invisible threads. Courcier’s use of AI visualizes that relational poetics. The machine’s imperfect attempts to replicate faces and gestures become metaphors for our collective struggle to comprehend one another across time, culture, and trauma. It is not precision that creates connection, but vulnerability. The work’s greatest triumph lies in its embrace of imperfection as a mode of truth.
In this light, Courcier’s project transcends mere self-exploration. It becomes an inquiry into how societies remember—how technologies, archives, and national narratives determine what counts as history. Her critique of Western visuality—its obsession with spectacle, its distance from suffering—is implicit but cutting. When she notes the American habit of scoring Vietnam War footage with “California Dreamin’,” she exposes the anesthetization of violence through aesthetics. Against that backdrop, Burn from Absence reclaims tenderness as a political act. Its beauty is unsentimental, its compassion disciplined.
The work’s sustainability lies precisely in its restraint. Courcier’s artistic power is not that of accumulation, but of erasure. She constructs with silence, allowing absence to speak its native language. The AI-generated images, for all their complexity, never overwhelm; they pulse like distant memories, breathing in time with the viewer’s own recollections. This harmony between technology and spirit suggests a new paradigm of artistic expression—one where innovation is not extractive but restorative.
What Courcier achieves here is a rare synthesis of aesthetics and ethics. Her command of form—her capacity to sculpt emotion from the most fragile digital material—demonstrates a discipline akin to that of Tarkovsky or Resnais, artists for whom time was both medium and wound. Yet unlike them, Courcier’s gaze is matrilineal, grounded in the inheritance of care. Her film is not a monument to loss but a living organism of compassion.
By its end, Burn from Absence has quietly undone the binary between real and unreal, history and invention, living and dead. It does not simply observe change—it enacts regeneration, within artist and audience alike. Courcier transforms the machinery of AI into a vessel for intimacy, suggesting that technology’s true vocation may not be domination, but remembrance.
Standing amid the four screens, one feels the air thicken with presence. The absent speak—not through words, but through the shimmer of reconstructed faces, the fragile cadence of a mother’s voice, the grain of images that seem to breathe. Courcier’s gift is to make us see that memory, like art itself, survives not by accuracy but by love.
In the age of synthetic truths, Burn from Absence restores the sacred responsibility of the artist: to tend the fire of what was nearly forgotten, and to burn, not from spectacle, but from tenderness.
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