Performances in Absentia, Western Europe (2016)
"Performances in Absentia" is a textual-photographic project that aims to create immersive recipes of longing and absence. While traveling abroad, I took photographs of scenes that would fill my imagination with possible performances to be activated with a far away and distant lover. After taking each photograph I would then sit with the image as a meditation for imagination and longing. I would then write out a poetic text that articulated a possible performance to be enacted in the depicted scene. For each, I knew the performance could never be actualized; however in creating the imagined pictorial-semantic scene, I was able to create a performance that inhabited the space of absence, and in reading it such an absence is then transmitted to a reader. In this regard, "Performances in Absentia" is filled with the imagined space of the “you” as the foundational place of discourse. The “You” is what an “I” lacks. The “You” is the expressive fullness unable to be achieved within the absoluteness of “I”. The "You" is the reach outwards that attempts to fill an "I" – and in its imaginings, in its pull, so too does this “You” fill and fulfill. In the imagined gesture of an "I/You" that will never be realized, a potential future is born from impossibility, and a meaning is reached whose traces can be always be felt but can never truly be held or grasped.
"Performances in Absentia" is a textual-photographic project that aims to create immersive recipes of longing and absence. While traveling abroad, I took photographs of scenes that would fill my imagination with possible performances to be activated with a far away and distant lover. After taking each photograph I would then sit with the image as a meditation for imagination and longing. I would then write out a poetic text that articulated a possible performance to be enacted in the depicted scene. For each, I knew the performance could never be actualized; however in creating the imagined pictorial-semantic scene, I was able to create a performance that inhabited the space of absence, and in reading it such an absence is then transmitted to a reader. In this regard, "Performances in Absentia" is filled with the imagined space of the “you” as the foundational place of discourse. The “You” is what an “I” lacks. The “You” is the expressive fullness unable to be achieved within the absoluteness of “I”. The "You" is the reach outwards that attempts to fill an "I" – and in its imaginings, in its pull, so too does this “You” fill and fulfill. In the imagined gesture of an "I/You" that will never be realized, a potential future is born from impossibility, and a meaning is reached whose traces can be always be felt but can never truly be held or grasped.