no longer not yet is a project combining photography and text
One of the consequences of the pandemic has been the re-enchantment of the public park, of the open air meeting as a breaching of the walls of domestic and private spaces.
Of what meetings are these (images of) vacant chairs the trace?
The project is a response to my encounter with chairs as I walked in the parks: empty, clustered together in pairs and groups, abandoned at random or carefully arranged, they came to seem like the ghostly traces of a series of meetings that I was either too late or too early to witness. These chairs marked the opening of the present moment; the no longer and the not yet.
Who sat here?
Who will sit here?
Why?
What desires, laughter, arguments, sadness, thoughts and promises filled or will fill the empty spaces?
The chair is often conceived of as the non-human form that conjures the human, the figural. The empty chair conjures ghosts.
A chair is a question, an invitation. Two chairs are a story.
The photographs were taken in September 2021 and July 2022 in Paris. None of these images were staged. I made the decision to have a constraint: the chairs must be left in the positions in which they are found.
Narrative, imagination and desire: beginning whenever there are more than one – chairs, people, photographs – the series or sequence is never fully present, its stories are told in the interstices, that is, in the spaces between the chairs, the images, the lives that come together and apart.
news will be posted here as the project develops
a selection of the text and images was published in Performance research 28.2 (2023) and features on the cover
