TAKE ME WITH YOU (2021)
works on paper made with ink and bar soap; video installation; four debossed artist's books
More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt myself losing time, struggling to differentiate one day from the next. Under lockdown in Paris, the days seemed to blend into one another. During this time, my partner and I were living 500 km apart, unable to visit one another due to the confinement restrictions.
works on paper made with ink and bar soap; video installation; four debossed artist's books
More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt myself losing time, struggling to differentiate one day from the next. Under lockdown in Paris, the days seemed to blend into one another. During this time, my partner and I were living 500 km apart, unable to visit one another due to the confinement restrictions.
In April 2021, we began a collaboration in which we kept a correspondence through a 'separation diary,' as a means of kindling a small daily connection with each other. Each morning, we sent each other a word, a phrase, a sentence, a poem, whatever—and wrote it on our skin. Then, at the end of the day, we sent each other a photo of our wrists.
When I began this process, I didn’t have any specific final product in mind, except for the performative task of sending words and documenting them on my skin. However, the process quickly became an important (and somewhat intimate) daily ritual for me. After I woke, I checked my texts, examined my skin, and wrote a new phrase. The collaboration served as a measure of marking time, visually representing its passage through ephemeral marks in ink.
In observation, I remarked in my sketchbook on the sixth day:
Like a vanishing scratch or a fading tattoo, the indelible mark of my partner’s words are left on the surface of my skin—even if they are no longer legible.
Transcribing my partner’s words every day not only on my arm, but also on paper, I washed and treated the paper each morning just as I did my skin. Physically touching the words each day and observing their gradual change and destruction was just as important to the process as the act of writing them initially.
After a few daily repetitions, I noticed the paper itself began to break down. To my surprise, the bar soap had a fascinating effect on the ink, alternately protecting and disintegrating the words. Simultaneously serving as a record of time, memory, ritual, and destruction, the marks were inevitably altered and washed away, becoming a memento of the words that were written there throughout the passing days.
Nothing lasts forever, of course. But through this shared artistic endeavor, I was able to mark the fleeting time, to create a meaningful ritual, and—ultimately—to feel a little less alone.
The project Take Me With You culminated in a single-channel black & white video piece. The night my partner returned after the thirty day ‘separation diary’ ritual had ended, we created a spontaneous one shot video together, which depicts us writing on and then washing each other's arms,