Aren’t we all fascinated by children, their vivid minds, their curiosity, creativity, and their ability to imagine worlds of wonder and absurdity, worlds that, as adults, we are barely able to grasp? It’s precisely this freedom of mind in children that inspired this work and is what Allyssa Heuze portrays in her serie Tic Tac Toe. A visual ode to childhood and its imaginary.

The base line for the series is Corentin’s childhood, his memories that the photographer revisits through a new angle. We see him in a paper dress or marvel at a simple cardboard box which for him will be an endless playground.

Viewing the world with the carefree eyes of a child, that is what this series is mainly about. Through lost objects, old photographs, poems, drawings from Corentin’s youth, through his stories and adventures that inspired this work, Allyssa interprets his childhood and presents us with an allegorical vision of it. Here are glimpses into the past, through her installations in an empty studio, the way a child would scribble on white paper. Other photographs were taken in symbolically charged places of his childhood: his birth home, the tree he used to climb on, etc.

What sparked this idea of being fascinated by how a child thinks, was when Allyssa came across a game of tic tac toe drawn on a metro tram floor, which got her thinking about how a child could find fun in any given space or time. In able to put herself in a child’s shoes, Allyssa looked to do this series with memories of someone else’s rather than her own.
By rediscovering childhood through a different lens, Allyssa dives back into that age of insouciance and revives the young memories of Corentin.