This presence of stories told by others would be reworked by the artist at every stage of the project, without however reducing the object to its source.(6) In the photographs Inventaire I (Inventory I, 2009) and Port de tête (Weighing on the Head, 2009), the sequence of images and the accumulation of objects covering de Groot’s head are accompanied by a series of short phrases describing friendships that have faded over time, a memory to be saved or erased, the simple inertia of a useless or unfamiliar object, the importance of objects received as gifts. In statements such as “I was given that by my best friend in grade three, with whom I haven’t spoken in four years” and “I don’t need it in order to remember” direct our view of the image towards precise subjects, such as the figures of connection and attachment and the expression of a tension between identification, signification and preservation, which she would employ to investigate the objects in museum collections. De Groot nevertheless avoids associating the text in these works with a particular object.(7) Rather, she makes use of the co-existence of diverse motifs in what has been bequeathed to her, letting the donors’ interpretations define in a plural manner this category of objects at the source of the collection. Here the collaboration poses the artist’s question from the outset, in the multiple ways to experience the objects, to relate our own experiences to them or to become attached to them depending on what they symbolize.(8) The textual fragments deriving from the collecting process act within the work and determine in part the protocols of de Groot’s actions and her methods of investigation. For example, the idea of grief conveyed by several of these objects’ stories would lead to photographic and narrative groupings associated with loss and memory in series such as La Perte (The Loss, 2012) and Collections (2012), as well as in the performance-reading Relation (2012). More particularly, the story told about a telephone which had transmitted the news of the successive deaths of several people close to its donor prompted de Groot to place this object alongside a Mexican sepulchre on which lay funerary offerings, an action which was documented and incorporated into the story of the lecture-performance Relation (2012). In addition, in the exhibition Rencontres au sommet (The Summit Meetings, SAAG, 2014), this telephone would be placed alongside other elements of the collection (eyeglasses and gloves which had also belonged to deceased persons) to form a kind of face.(9) These stories, which lead us to reflect on the value and meaning attributed to the objects bequeathed to the artist, play a primordial role in all of the actions she undertakes (inventorying, arranging, wearing, traveling). When de Groot places the object in a setting or alongside other objects from museum collections, they give sustenance to the narrative propositions through their “(hi)story” and influence the forms that it produces, which evoke the body, the face, bonds, family relations, an altar on which a burial offering is placed, store shelves, processions and the crowd.