In 2015, I was commissioned to carry out the photographic archiving of a Swiss architect’s collection of doll’s houses. The collection comprises around fifty pieces, mainly of German or English origin, built between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century. For this work, I took typological and systematic shots of their façades, in black and white with a frontal viewpoint to avoid distortions and focus the eye on their graphic and formal data.

As I handled them and observed their interiors, I was struck by the sociological interest and narrative potential of these toy objects, originally made to introduce little girls in a playful way to their future role as mothers, wives and housewives. These considerations resonated with other subjects I was studying at the same time, namely the history of the invention of hysteria and the fabrication of representations of the feminine through the photographic medium. The project then took on a broader and more personal dimension. It was approached in the form of an anthropological investigation, continuing over several years. It takes the form of several photographic series involving the collector herself in the role of model, a decorator, a costume designer, a theatre wigmaker and a contemporary dancer. I envisaged these miniature houses as theatres of historical memories, platforms for projections that I activated by playing with scale and staging. Sometimes I photographed their interiors, using meticulous lighting and exterior backdrops to create a sense of verisimilitude. Sometimes by reproducing their wallpapers on a human scale and having the collector pose in period costumes, using, depending on the period, the attitudes of fashion/architecture magazine mannequins, or the gestures of hysterics portrayed by Jean-Martin Charcot in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière.