HEYDT’s destruction of old slide film is not mere experimentation but a radical act of unmasking. By subjecting family photographs—those sacred relics of cultural and personal mythology—to the violent alchemy of household chemicals, she exposes the photograph for what it truly is: a lie. Photography, the so-called preserver of memory, is revealed as a mechanism of distortion, a tool that constructs the past in the image of the present. The photograph does not capture truth; it fabricates it. In annihilating the cherished images of familial life, HEYDT dismantles the comforting fiction of memory as stable or objective. What remains are ghostly fragments—traces of a past that refuses to stay still, distorted by the very act of preservation. These images are not nostalgic mementos but sites of rupture, where the banalities of family and cultural narratives are transformed into something uncanny, something that resists easy meaning. This act of destruction is, paradoxically, an act of creation. In obliterating the old, HEYDT opens a space for something new—a confrontation with the constructed nature of memory itself. Her work reveals the photograph as a battleground where the tensions between presence and absence, reality and imagination, truth and fiction, play out. By destroying the image, HEYDT does not erase memory but lays bare its politics, its fragility, its mutability. The result is a brutal yet poetic critique of the cultural narratives that shape us. The family album, that shrine to collective identity, becomes a site of subversion, its images dissolved into a kaleidoscope of distortion and possibility. HEYDT’s work forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth: memory is not a reflection of the past but a weapon wielded in the struggle over how we construct ourselves in the present.
