Imagine living in a house full of books, but the most important pages are blank.
In my family, the past was exactly that for a long time: a white sheet. A taboo. My grandparents never spoke about what had been. It seemed as if their lives only began the moment I met them as their granddaughter. The decades before? One single, vast silence.

But silence leaves traces. You don't find them in stories shared over coffee, but in the things that have outlasted the forgetting.
After my grandparents passed away, I came across battered photo albums. Inside were small, black-and-white windows into a world I was never allowed to enter. I looked at faces I didn’t recognize, saw places whose names I could barely pronounce. And yet, there was a connection.

On the back of the photos, I found my grandfather’s handwriting – elegant, clean, almost fragile in its precision. He had noted places and seasons, as if he wanted to ensure that the paper, at least, would not forget what he could not say out loud.
One photo is burned into my memory: my grandparents as a young couple. They are holding each other as if nothing else in the world existed. On the back, a declaration of love from my grandfather to my grandmother. In that moment, I pulled out the engagement ring she had left to me. I held it up to the light, and suddenly, history became a tangible weight in my hand.

This is what drives me. It is the search for the poetry of found objects. This is exactly what we do: curating the fragments of history, searching for truth in the details, and finding an answer to the silence. Whether in my book or in the tools I design for you – we are searching for what remains.

Viviane A. Grabik