"When the words are silent" is a reflection on memory and questions the traces of time, the memory. It is more generally a work around the relic, this object witness of a bygone era, which intrinsically takes on a sacred character; and on "the palimpsest", which designates a manuscript whose writings have been removed, to include a new text. The palimpsest is paradoxical: it is both oblivion and memory, trace of a disappearance and bearer of a new creation. Making words and stories disappear from objects is a way of reviving them in the form of a new memory, visual and subjective.