SEPTEMBER 2026
AN ANONYMOUS PASSAGE: THROUGH BLANK SPACES - PHOTOGRAPHY, WRITTEN WORD, AND OBJECTS
ARTIST STATEMENT
These photographs were not planned in the traditional sense. I did not designate a particular day or imagine the individual images beforehand.
For several days I had been meditating and quietly contemplating Villa Emma. I knew only that I wanted to cover the furniture with white sheets—not to conceal it, but to quiet the space so that a dialogue with the house might come forth.
On Friday, June 26, 2025, at six o'clock in the morning, I finally felt compelled to begin.
Before daylight had fully entered the rooms, I closed every exterior shutter, gradually withdrawing the light from the villa. Then, one by one, I carefully covered the furniture. It was an act of slowing down rather than hiding. I wanted to reduce the visual complexity of the interiors so that the architecture, the atmosphere, and the changing light could become more apparent.
The rooms slowly transformed. Chairs, tables, sofas, and cabinets became anonymous forms—temporary islands suspended between presence and preservation. The familiar domestic interior gave way to a quieter landscape where the eye could wander differently.
Only then did I begin reopening the shutters.
As the daylight gradually returned, every adjustment altered the atmosphere of the room. The photographs emerged from that unfolding encounter. They were intuitive, immediate, and impossible to predict. Rather than directing the light, I found myself responding to it. I moved quietly through the villa, allowing each room to suggest what it needed, asking what it wanted of me rather than imposing my own expectations upon it.
What unfolded was far more than a photographic exercise.
It transformed my relationship with Villa Emma.
I began to experience the villa not simply as a building, but as a place that continues to hold the lives of those who have lived, worked, visited, and cared for it across generations. The staircases, the floors, the windows, the mirrors, and the architecture itself no longer felt like separate elements but participants in a continuing conversation.
After making the photographs, I deliberately put them away.
For nearly a year I resisted explaining them. Instead, I returned to them slowly, allowing time to become part of the work. Looking again and again, I realized the photographs were asking questions that I had not understood while making them. They became less a record of what I had seen than an invitation into a deeper dialogue—with the villa, with memory, and with myself.
The documents presented alongside these photographs were all created one year later.
The dedication to Villa Emma, the field notes, the imagined correspondence with Jessie Boswell, the inventories, climate reports, security transcripts, and the handwritten journals are not historical records. They are contemporary acts of observation. They represent my attempt to understand what the photographs had continued to reveal long after the camera had been put away.
The archive did not produce the photographs.
The photographs produced the archive.
Together they form an ongoing conversation with Villa Emma—a house that continues to receive artists, preserve memory, and quietly reveal itself to those willing to return, to observe, and to listen.
