Clara Fortis

I chose to remake Christian Boltanski’s Théâtre D’ombres , a work depicting children’s nightmares. The artwork is particularly striking in its haunting use of shadow play, a technique I adapted for my own project. Boltanski is well-known for work combining fact and fiction. The artist often created "memories" of a life he had never lived. This twisting of fact and fiction prompted me to consider the act of lying. Lie With Me began with a survey I sent out, which received over a hundred responses. I wanted to understand the contexts in which people lie, to what extent they lie, and why they lie. Individuals were asked to use a scale of 1 to 10 to represent how often they lie and to describe a lie they had told. I specified that the lie could be major or minor. It was interesting to see how people responded to such an intimate question when promised anonymity. The more I analyzed the responses, the more I grasped how unpredictable lying was. The lies were completely random. One does not know when one is being lied to. One does not know what is fiction.