5 rue de Verneuil, the former house of Serge Gainsbourg located in the heart of Paris, the residence in which she grew up, Charlotte Gainsbourg turned it into a museum in honor of his father. She is a collector when it comes to the belongings of missing people that she cherished so much. What if the house in Brittany by Jane Birkin is not a museum, objects that belonged to her have become essential to her daughter. Especially one of them, that she never leaves. This is what the 53-year-old artist told Harper’s Bazaar, where she is on the cover this Thursday, January 23. She evokes this piece with so much value in her eyes, but also the void left by the disappearance of her mother, to our colleagues.
“It’s devastating the death of your second parentshares the actress and wife of Yvan Attal. We no longer have any bearings, we no longer know who we are. Of course my mother was sick, so we tried to prepare as best we could. But we are never prepared.” This is why she filmed the documentary Jane by Charlotte in 2021. To let him know what she meant to him, and to declare her love for him. “But I didn’t imagine that I wouldn’t be able to do without her, admits the mother of Ben, Alice and Jo Attal. I realized that it gave meaning to everything I did. Not that I was doing things for her but her reactions, whether she liked it or not, that mattered a lot. Once she is dead, there remains absolute lack.“
What Charlotte Gainsbourg truly lacks, what she will never have again from her mother
This lack also translates into everything that she will no longer have of herself: “his voice, his personality, his memory, his world so rich and original“, the artist rightly lists. So she tries to fill this void as best she can. Charlotte Gainsbourg thus reveals that she lives with an object that belonged to her mother. “I live with the suitcase studded with snickers and Aung San Suu Kyi’s face that she carried everywhere, from concert to hotel, she says. She is in my office.” A true symbol.
