Every Wednesday after school, at exactly 4:30, I would step out of my building, down the street, past the Soi dogs (street dogs), past the 7/11, across Rama IV road, past the swampy wasteland, and the flocks of crows, until I reached the Alliance Francaise (The French cultural embassy). My mother didn’t know about my shortcut. She had given me strict instructions and precisely 40 baht of motorcycle-taxi allowance (which I promptly pocketed). She would’ve taken away both my freedom, and the 40 baht, had she known.
The Alliance Francaise was built in the middle of a marsh, surrounded by semi-abandoned buildings and fields of weeds. Next to it, stood the Australian and Japanese embassies, both uninviting concrete blocks. I always wondered what had prompted the decision to construct all these buildings here, far from almost anything remotely relevant. The whole area still felt haunted by the past, almost as if the Asian Financial Crisis had left behind a shadow that never quite lifted
But speaking of haunting, what do I carry with me, what or who are these recurring ghosts?
When I began this MA, I was drawn to the tension between presence and absence, memory and erasure. Through my carefully curated collection of family archives, I painted portraits of my grandmothers, both mixed race orphans, and collateral damage of French colonialism. I became fascinated in the way they perceived their ‘otherness’, and how this intrinsic sense of dislocation reverberated through subsequent generations. I asked myself: How does the past interweave with the present? And how might I materially channel the presence of memory?
I do not paint what I see, I paint what i saw, what I felt. (Munch, cited in Holland, 2005)
This reflection became a point of resonance as I walked through the exhibition Edvard Munch: Artist Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery earlier this year. I was struck by the looming presence of death and disease throughout his life and work. Drawing from memories of his older sister, who succumbed of tuberculosis at the age of 15, just a few years after their mother’s death, Munch obsessively returned to ‘The Sick Child’ as a motif. He “(...) considered perceptions of a place or person to be coloured by memory, contemplation and emotion, and chose to show this rather than an exact depiction (...). He captured moments, feelings and pulsations of life.” (Whitaker, 2015).
“Although Munch’s motif (referring to ‘The Sick Child’) is rooted in personal memory, the many versions of it express a universal feeling of grief.” (Arentz, 2024) Viewing Munch’s portraits, and perceiving his overwhelming grief, I understood that what I was interested in was the collective idea of memory, more than that of memory itself. When I ask myself about the persistence of my grandmothers’ pasts within my own present and future, I am also asking myself about every grandmother, and every present, and every future.
I. Haunting pasts, haunted futures: On Hauntology, from Derrida to Fisher
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Faulkner, Requiem for a nun, 1951)
Drawn from the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism” (Marx & Engels, 1848), hauntology is a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, gesturing toward a mode of being in which the past perpetually interrupts and destabilises the present. The term hauntology (or hantologie, in its original French) was introduced by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International (1993). He theorised that Marxism, following the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoliberal hegemony, would persist as a spectral presence, haunting western society.
Mark Fisher reinterpreted the term in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). Applying it to contemporary culture, and arguing that the past seems to overshadow the possibility of newness and innovation. He defines the incapacity of imagining truly original futures, the doomed recycling of past aesthetics, and the melancholic longing for futures imagined but never realised, as “lost futures”. Through this lens, Fisher moved the term of ‘hauntology’ away from its Marxist and philosophical roots, to a broader critique of societal stagnation, hinting at its pop-culture manifestations, and the commodification of nostalgia.
I was born in Bangkok in 2000, 3 years after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, a time when Thailand, and much of Southeast Asia, were still struggling to recover from widespread economic collapse.
Across the street from my หมู่บ้าน (mu baan, housing estate) stood a building that was never completed. Every few years, new developers would attempt to revive this project, to no avail. This empty shell, like so many others, peppered around the city, served as a reminder of these halted futures. In retrospect, hauntology had always shaped my understanding of the world, embedded in both inherited memory and the shared atmosphere of post-financial crisis Thailand.
a. On ghosts and materiality: Working with Lithography
This year, I discovered lithography, a printmaking process that consists of drawing on a limestone (or a metal plate) with greasy, ink-adhering substances. Before working on a new project, the stone has to be grained, slowly erasing what was previously printed. This is a and meticulous task, the stone’s surface is easily scratched and the previous image sometimes almost impossible to get rid of. In 116 Rue Lecourbe (Own work, 2025), I grew impatient and decided to ignore the shadowy presence imprinted on the stone I was using, deciding it would become part of my image, a reminder of what came before.
The first etch was pale, almost ghostly. The shape that I had failed to remove seemed more present than my own. I fought with it, using acid to diminish its presence. After 2 weeks, I returned to my stone.
After two weeks, I returned to my stone. The second etch produced sharper, bolder lines, the previous image’s stain completely erased. Yet, I wondered, was this what I was looking to achieve? By removing the trace, had I also erased its memory?
The stone, in itself, was an archive. A palimpsest of gestures and ideas, each layer both effaced and preserved. Through it, the material enacted the very tension that hauntology describes: the persistence of what is gone.
Returning to my question: How might I materially channel the presence of memory?
In Wires I (Own work, 2024), I chose to capture a familiar landscape: Bangkok’s Chinatown. Working in tandem with my memories and a photo I had taken in 2022, I focused on the tangled web of electric cables that lace the city’s streets. In tracing these lines, I sought to translate their low and constant hum onto the stone, turning my hand into a conduit for memory.
(Second row, left to right) Reference photos taken in Bangkok, Own work, Film (2022). Wires 1, Own work, Lithograph (2024)
I began to understand that to channel memory materially is not to reproduce faithfully, but to let it interfere, allowing its spectral presence to shape the image as it emerges.
B. Why Blue? On using colour with intention.
Is building narratives between works a necessary part of an artist’s practice? How can a painting belong to a network? Could the use of colour link my work to each other, as well as to human history?
I first painted entirely in blue for my self-portrait, Huh? (2025). But why blue?
For this piece, I was searching for a connection with my Southeast Asian heritage, using blue and white, colours often used on traditional porcelain. Yet, I realized that blue extends far beyond this context. It is a colour that has accompanied humanity through time, that we have strived to capture throughout time.
“Early mankind had no access to blue because blue is not what you call an Earth colour, you don’t find it in the soil” (Berke, 2002) I remember walking into Queen Nefertari’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, in Luxor, Egypt. The ceiling was adorned with golden stars, and the walls with images of Nefertari being welcomed by a plethora of gods, performing ceremonies from the Book of the Dead. (Watson, 2022) This tomb was built around 1250 BC, more than 3200 years ago. I was struck by how vibrant the blues were, even centuries after their application onto the grave’s stoney walls and ceilings.
Egyptian Blue was later adapted across the Mesopotamian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires, where entire workshops were devoted to its production. Meanwhile, in China, “chemists created blue pigments by blending copper with heavy elements like barium, lead and mercury.” (Berke, quoted by 2002). Across continents and centuries, the pursuit of blue persisted.
Possibly as early as 600BC, evidence of the use of blue was discovered in the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. The method of producing this pigment, dubbed “Mayan Blue”, is still considered to be a mystery. Maya Blue didn’t seem to gain popularity among colonial, baroque artists, but another local pigment, Indigo, did.
In an attempt to further understand the materials I was using, I also attended multiple pigment-extraction workshops. One such workshop taught me how to extract woad pigment, from planting the seed to harvesting and laking it.
When I paint with ultramarine blue, I connect my personal history to wider cultural trajectories. The colour becomes a reminder of what came before, carrying with it residues of distant pasts and human labour. Hand in hand with it, I can attempt to channel memory. Because to paint with blue, is to let the material itself hold the memory of what refuses to disappear.
II. A reliquary of encounters, walking as an artistic practice.
In 1921, members of the Dada movement organized a series of ‘Dada Excursions’, visiting places that had ‘no reason to exist’, advocating a form of ‘anti-tourism’. These trips sought to celebrate banality, or the absence of meaning; “ (...) a way of rejecting art’s assigned urban spaces. (...) The dadaists wanted the total secularization of art to achieve a union between art and life, and the sublime and the quotidian. They took flânerie* and raised it to the level of an aesthetic operation.” (Mueller, 2021)
During the first (and last) of these performances, the artists and their audience met in Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre’s churchyard. “André Breton read a manifesto and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes parodied an official tour guide, reading arbitrary definitions from a dictionary as keys to monuments in the church yard. A scheduled auction of abstractions was cancelled due to rain, and a porcelain-repairer and peanut-seller orchestra never performed because they never showed up.” (Bishop, 2012)
What do we look at when we walk? What do we remember? When we walk in the city, we let our minds wander. We travel through time, alongside strangers and people we might have known. “In London we move amongst ghosts, they inhabit us, they speak through us.” (Ford L.G., 2011)
In my Shoegaze series (Shoegaze I,II,III,IV, Oil on paper, 2025), I sought to create a map of my meanderings across London through my chance encounters. The word Shoegaze is a reference to a subgenre of alternative, dream-pop music, known for its extensive use of reverb. The name in itself comes from the effects pedal that musicians use and look down at while playing their songs.
Weird Walk (2019-present), is a zine project that encourages its readers to engage with the world around them by exploring British landscapes through the gauge of folklore, mythology and history. But most of all, it is a zine about walking. (Walkspace, 2020) In Reliquary of a Morning Stroll (Oil on paper and Digital editing, 2025), I drew my focus on a single walk, as opposed to multiple. Inspired by Weird Walk’s outlook on the act of walking, I experimented with the zine format, imagining a series of these such reliquaries.
(Second Row) Reliquary of a morning stroll, Own work, Zine format, digital editing, (2025)
The Mise en scene du vide (staging of emptiness, in French) is a term I discovered while reading Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight (1959). The main character, Agilulf, is a knight who exists as an empty suit of armour, sustained purely by willpower. Emptiness is given meaning through actions, and narrative.
The Dadaists celebrated banality and the absence of meaning; Calvino staged emptiness.
My submission for the MA show (Chance Encounter(s), Oil on canvas, 2025) integrates my own, personal act of flânerie into a wider cultural rhizome. Each of the elements in my paintings are pulled from an archive of chance encounters, found during walks, in museums, in family archives…
For this year’s Research Festival, Metabolizer, I chose to publish a zine and organize a workshop. The workshop, Scattering and Gathering: Collecting Chance Encounters, will invite participants to engage with the South London Gallery as a site of observation, interaction, and response. Through walking, collecting, and documenting, participants will produce individual contributions that reflect their encounter with the gallery and its surrounding environment. These responses will be assembled into a collaboratively produced zine, situating the practice of zine-making within a framework of collective authorship and spatial exploration. The zine, by the same name, exists as an open conversation with my workshop, as well as Chance Encounter(s).
* Flânerie is the act of wandering through urban spaces with no strict aim. The Flâneur observes the world around them. “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” (Baudelaire, 1863)
III. Scattering and gathering: On collecting Chance Encounters
A. Les Chants de Maldoror
While reading about surrealism, realising how deeply the movement drew inspiration from the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse)’s only novel: Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), brought up the memory of my weekly walk to and from the Alliance Francaise. Because it was precisely in this building that I first heard about Ducasse.
Little is known about this man. He was born in Montevideo, and was sent to a boarding school in Paris at the age of thirteen. Where he died, 11 years later. Inspired by the romantic authors, Ducasse chose to write in order to “portray the pleasures of cruelty”. In a letter to his publisher, he explains: ‘I have written of evil (...) as [John] Milton and [Charles] Baudelaire, etc. have all done’ but ‘more vigorously’. (Ducasse, 1869)
Divided into six parts, or ‘chants’, this “macabre comedy of humanity” (de Lassus Saint-Geniès, 2012) follows ‘Maldoror’, a man, or a demon, or a metaphor. He preaches his lust for evil, “(...) Maldoror fut bon pendant ses premières années, où il vécut heureux; c’est fait. Il s’aperçut ensuite qu’il était méchant: fatalité extraordinaire!(…) Il se jeta résolument dans la carrière du mal…” (translation: (...) Maldoror was a good man during his first years, he lived a happy life, that’s done. He then came to realise that he was mean: extraordinary destiny! (...) He resolutely threw himself into a career of evil…). (Lautreamont, 1869), while seeking to liberate himself from the hindrance of human conscience. Throughout the six chants, he mocks ‘god’, commits violent murders, rapes and other absurd horrors.
B. What is the ‘chance encounter’?
“He was (...) beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” (Lautréamont, 1869, p327)
André Breton was introduced to Les Chants de Maldoror after Philippe Soupault happened to find a copy in a Parisian bookstore. He was immediately drawn to it, referring to it as the “key to surrealism”. (Breton, 1924)
In his first Surrealist Manifesto (1924), he referred to the chance encounter as the idea that unexpected or seemingly random meetings between unrelated people, objects, or even events, have the capacity to reveal hidden meanings or unconscious insights. Celebrating both the accident and the coincidence as pathways to deeper truths, beyond rational control.
C. My favorite artists’ favorite artist
When I was 17, I tattooed Amedeo Modigliani’s signature across my right hand, so I could become one of his paintings. Now, every time I use my dominant hand, I am reminded of him.
I can exactly pinpoint the moment I fell in love with his work, it was in 2010, in the Musée d’Art Modern, in Paris. I was 9, and I sat in front of Woman with a Fan (Modigliani, 1919) for what seemed like forever. It would be the first and last time that I would see this painting. It was stolen a few months after our encounter, and has not been found since. Was our meeting pure luck? Was it fate?
“Modi [Referring to Amedeo Modigliani, who liked to go by this nickname, probably in reference to the French word “maudit”, meaning “cursed”] usually carried a copy of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror in his pocket - sometimes torn into sections for portability. He would spontaneously erupt with passages of his favorite author, whether or not his companions wanted to hear his ranting. (...) Like Modi, he [Referring to Issidore Ducasse] led a wretched existence, died miserably and achieved posthumous fame.” (Meyers, 2020)
In French, we don’t say ‘love at first sight’, we call it a coup de foudre (a lighting strike). The second time I felt this coup de foudre was years later, in a less visited corner of the Musée d’Orsay, next to the Nabis, in room 70. There, I discovered Félix Vallotton’s Femmes à leur toilette (1897). It seemed to glow, beside the watchful eye of his self-portrait (Autoportrait, 1897). Vallotton’s brushstrokes, the shapes of his subjects, the colours, the perspective… everything about it felt electric. I couldn’t get enough of it. In fact, I never will.
During a tutorial with Anna Bunting Branch, we spoke of exorcisms: what recurs in my practice, what do I carry, and what have I shed?
Les Chants de Maldoror seems to cling to me. Wherever I go, Ducasse appears again. It feels as though my first encounter with his work was never chance, but inevitable. Which brings me back to my question: what do I carry with me? What, or who, are my recurring ghosts?
But Ducasse isn’t my personal ghost. He’s haunted everyone: the Surrealists, Modigliani, René Magritte, Joan Miró… Even Felix Vallotton drew an imaginary portrait of this strange man. (Portrait of French poet le Comte de Lautréamont, 1896) “Imagine Ducasse knew he had sipped an elixir of immortality. In a prescient note, he wrote: ‘[Maldoror will] be completed after my death’.” (Pounds, 2020)
IV. What perpetuates the middle: On the Cultural Rhizome.
“For though this experience made you, original victim floating through the sea’s abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. (...) Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge.” (Glissant, 1990, p8)
A. What is the rhizome?
Édouard Glissant’s original use of the expression ‘rhizome’ (rhizomatic) describes and exposes the complexity of the antillais identity. ‘The Rhizome is a plant that grows underground and has roots that grow around other roots. Glissant applies it to ‘creolization’, where roots meet and share cultural bounds to form an identity.’ (Verstraete, 2014) “Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Glissant, 1990, p11)
In his memoir, ‘Nina Simone’s Gum: a memoir of things lost and found’, Warren Ellis (year) speaks of the connections formed by seemingly insignificant ‘things’. A piece of gum, chewed by Nina Simone during her last public concert, folded into her towel and hidden away in his attic for more than two decades, felt like a personal treasure. He couldn’t imagine anyone sharing the wonder he felt at the thought of owning this object, let alone the religious reverence at which he held it. And yet, it became a relic, toured the world, presented atop a marble plinth. ‘This is how relics work. Objects become the repositories of the spirit of the person who was associated with them.’ (Barker, 2023) They too, become a part of the cultural rhizome.
I have a very clear memory of the first time I questioned my identity. My year 4 teacher Mr Hockley had tasked us with illustrating our lockers with our countries’ flags. My father walked in on me colouring in the Vietnamese flag, carefully sharing a quarter of the page with the Laotian flag, beside the French one. “C’est quoi tout ça? T’es Française hein.. C’est tout” (What’s all this? You’re French. That’s it.) He promptly scribbled out the other two flags, ‘fixing’ my mistake. Before this incident, I hadn’t ever really thought about where I came from: I had a mix of french, laotian and vietnamese blood. I was born in Thailand, and would live there for the foreseeable future, if not forever. That was that.
Apparently that wasn’t that. Apparently, identity is much more complicated than simple transmission. My grandmothers are a great example of this, they both carried their asian genes with shame. A few years after the flag incident, Beatrice (my paternal grandmother) visited us in Bangkok. She mentioned thinking it was a shame that certain Thai girls bleached their “beautiful black hair”. Beatrice bleached her own beautiful black hair. I was 11, I already knew better than to question this.
But coming back to my father, I spent years questioning his aversion to accepting he was a mixed race individual. It’s not like he can hide it, it’s written on his face, on his ‘beautiful black hair’. It made no sense to me. Just as my mother had, he had made the choice to move to Asia, he had made the choice to meet his family. Yet when I brought up my research, and Glissant’s rhizome, pointing out that it applied to us too, he refused to hear it. Comparing me to people who take 23 and me genetic tests and change their entire personality after discovering they’re 1/1000th italian.
I understand that this is a reaction to systemic racism, that this is a way for my father to shield himself. When he was a child and people called him Chinese, he would lie and say he was native american (apparently a much ‘cooler’ and more mysterious place to come from?). He’s built his personality off of this myth of the ‘french man’: a cigar-smoking-wine-drinking-sunglasses-at-night-wearing wannabe dandy. French to the point of revising his own history.
A few years ago, my father legally took his mother’s last name. Going from Cyril Payen to Cyril Payen Dubois de la Patelliere. The Dubois de la Patelliere are a French noble family, known for a few movie directors, a 19th century expressionist painter, and a plethora of colonialist generals. He asked me if I wanted to change my name too. I agreed at the time, thinking it would be really funny to be a ‘noblewoman’.
When I emitted the option of adding ‘Paysavat’ (his great-grandmother’s last name) instead, my father retorted that we weren’t Laotian. And that, that name would “only bring us problems”. I realized this was a lost cause.
His identity, just as mine, and my mother’s, and my grandmothers’, is part of a rhizome: fed by earlier generations and cultures past, present, and future. Whether we like it or not.
B. Exploring the Rhizome through materiality.
Candice Lin’s current installation (g/hosti), commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, leads the viewer through a painted cardboard maze of shadows and shapes. “A text written by Lin and inscribed around the outer circumference of the room unlocks the meaning of the exhibition title g/hosti, which references ghosts, but also contains the roots of the words “guest”, “host”, “hostile” and the Old English word “gæst” meaning “stranger”.” (Studio International, 2025)
Through her practice, Lin explores and addresses “marginalised histories, colonial legacies and the materials that link them” (Whitechapel Gallery, 2025), using a plethora of installation techniques and material choices.
G/hosti speaks of Lin’s experience as an American, feeling guilty, helpless and small in front of tragedies unfolding in the world around her. It denounces Donald Trump’s policies, the genocide in Gaza, and “(...) overwhelming, inhumane horror.” She comments, “(...) It has made me [Candice Lin] think about nested circles within circles – microcosmos within macrocosmos, endlessly unfolding. There is something profoundly surreal and disorienting about going through the motions of daily life while witnessing and feeling the weight of one’s embeddedness within a nation bent on the destruction of others, and the punishment and removal of those that dare to speak out for those others.” (Lin 2025)
G/hosti, just as all of Lin’s previous work, exists as a part of Glissant’s theory of the rhizome: further proving that there is no starting point to identity, only “the multiplicity of cultural identities in an individual.” (Verstraet, 2014)
What I love about my practice is the act of discovery, I am unable to shackle myself to a single medium, let alone a single colour. Lin’s installation was eye-opening, it served as a reminder that artistic expression does not need to be confined to a single form. Her approach to materiality, where form, history and politics intertwine, embodies Glissant’s rhizome, in which “Identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation”. (Glissant, 1990, p11)
Speaking of discovery, ‘Ouch!‘ (2025, own work) was fuelled by a desire to ‘move on’ from my ‘Chance Encounter(s)’ series. After painting eleven separate canvases, I grew tired. I decided that I had become bored of these repetitive blue motifs. But was I bored, or was I simply afraid to face the truth? During numerous crits, spanning from the end of the degree show to the end of the final semester, I received the same question: where was my work headed? ‘Ouch!’ is an attempt to answer this question: it adopts the same visual codes I explored in ‘Chance Encounter(s)’ all the while adding on to them. It emulates the theory of rhizomatic identity through the coexistence of two, distinct visual languages: the monochromatic, ultramarine blue, intuitive line drawings, and the more ‘realistic’ portrait.
In ‘Chance Encounter(s)’, I spent more time working on the material aspect of the paintings. I worried about how I did everything, ultimately spending more time on the preparation and creation of the canvases than the actual paintings. I didn’t ask myself enough questions: Why am I working in a series of small, scattered canvases, as opposed to a single large one? Why are my paintings organized in this particular order- is there an order? What connects them?
A tutor mentioned that, without my writing at its side, this series lacked direction. Was the solution to have them exist in the same space? Or was it to help the viewer, to give them a direction to ‘walk through’ the image. In ‘Ouch!’, the viewer’s gaze is guided: the subject of the painting points to a chance encounter that physically interacts with him. And in turn, each chance encounter leads to the next, until we leave the space of the canvas’surface.
I think there’s different ways to talk about the rhizome, and how our identities are shaped by a melting pot of exterior factors.
Conclusion
Two months ago, I experienced Carolina Bianchi and Cara de Cavalo’s performance, The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella. I use the word experienced, because I walked into the Southbank Center without a clue as to what I was about to watch. The performance “ (...) draws on art history and personal trauma to examine and test the memory of sexual violence against women.” (South Bank Center, 2025) I watched, as Bianchi ingested GHB, as her speech gradually slurred, as she fell asleep. I watched, as her inert body was manipulated, as it was shoved into the boot of a car. I watched, as her troop inserted a camera into her uterus, while she was still unconscious. And as I watched, I wondered, how far am I willing to go for my art?
Before passing out, Carolina Bianchi spoke about the Italian performance artist, Pippa Bacca’s ( Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo) last performance: Brides on Tour (2008). Accompanied by her friend, and fellow artist, Silvia Moro, the pair planned to hitchhike from Milan to Jerusalem wearing wedding dresses. “As they hitchhiked, Moro periodically stopped and asked women to embroider patterns on her wedding dress. Bacca intended to meet with midwives along the way and wash their feet. (...) Once they reached Tel-Aviv, they intended to ceremonially wash the wedding dresses, and, in doing so, “wash away traces of war.” So the project highlighted women, their accomplishments and rights, and their relations to global conflict and strife.” (Corsa, 2017)
The duo had a rule, they would ride in any stranger’s car, choosing to put their trust in humanity above intuition and prejudice.
This is ultimately what cost Pippa Bacca her life. Whilst they were in Turkïye, Moro instinctively refused to get into a car. The pair argued, and decided to part ways- they would meet again at the next stop. Bacca never made it, her naked, strangled and decomposing body was found in a bush a few kilometers away from Istanbul. (Povoledo, 2008)
As I reach the end of this MA course, I find myself returning to a question I asked in unit 2, and adding on to it: Why do I paint what I do? And how far am I willing to go to do so? While the visual art I produce should never put me in the same physical situations as Pippa Bacca and Carolina Bianchi, what is the emotional toll I pay for painting my ghosts?
Every painting, every zine, each blue brush stroke hosts what insists on returning. To paint is not to exorcise, but to accompany; to let memory find its form through material. Perhaps this is the emotional toll of my practice: to remain open to what unsettles me, to keep walking through these haunted terrains, scattering and gathering as I go.
I AM AFRAID OF SILENCE
I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK
I AM AFRAID TO FALL DOWN
I AM AFRAID OF INSOMNIA
I AM AFRAID OF EMPTINESS
IS SOMETHING MISSING?
YES, SOMETHING IS MISSING AND ALWAYS WILL BE MISSING
THE EXPERIENCE OF EMPTINESS
I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK
I AM AFRAID TO FALL DOWN
I AM AFRAID OF INSOMNIA
I AM AFRAID OF EMPTINESS
IS SOMETHING MISSING?
YES, SOMETHING IS MISSING AND ALWAYS WILL BE MISSING
THE EXPERIENCE OF EMPTINESS
Louise Bourgeois, from I Am Afraid, 2009
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