Festive Dinner

Festive Dinner engages with the profound ways in which family history inhabits our lives – its hidden figures and secret narratives lingering behind the traditional tableau of the cheerful gathering. Families are among the most powerful structures we know. Festive dinners, commonly imagined as occasions of joy, are for many a catalyst of conflict and secrecy – feared precisely because they may revive buried traumas, release long-held resentments, or set new struggles in motion.

The mechanism of unconscious intergenerational transmission is a particularly elusive dimension of our psychic life. It shapes our feelings and beliefs without leaving trace – like imperceptible ghosts laying down invisible railings: paths we will inevitably follow, and others we will never dare take.