Thoughts

Home isn’t only the physical roof and dwelling - it includes community, living well, and a vision of the future that isn’t what I’ve come to define as the marry-mortgage-die structure. That isn’t a criticism but an acknowledgement of what capitalism has done in nuclearising the family, creating false myths of independence, whether financial or of resources, all in favour of a system that is not built around the real needs, the needs of human beings, but around the needs of capital: the dehumanising idea of wealth that has been brought onto the main stage by centuries of elites pushing their own idea of what constitutes a good life. A life of belonging, and of having to defend it from hypothetical enemies.

The history of humanity - not the one written down in books, that one is the history of power, not the history of The People - says the opposite. People have always come together when facing practical challenges, hardships and obstacles, but also to celebrate, to procreate, and to feel a sense of belonging. That’s what people have always done - not those surrounded by moats and crocodiles and the suffocating fear of losing their possessions.

Someone who put me in touch with one of the communities I visited told me “It’s just a field, there’s nothing to see”. There was everything to see: an open ground where people could still decide what happens next. What a privilege to witness that. How many of you have been able to do so? To be somewhere where the soil is so rich that just by walking on it you feel nourished, enriched, more resilient than when you first arrived?

Care and intelligence, choices made for the common good - not because I hold some high morality, but because the common good is the only thing that gives back without your having to ask whether it does. Made with the future in mind. Not for the now, but to keep future freedoms open rather than extracted.

This project, above all, is a reminder, mostly to myself. That we can. We’re echo-systems: we rely and thrive on each other, on the reverberations we all generate, and we suffer from it too. Dreaming better futures isn’t an idle process, an elitist indulgence in speculative horizons. Dreaming is the action that makes futures happen - or rather, that unlocks them.

The work goes outside, where everyone already is, and it’s allowed to fade, wear out, decompose, be forgotten. A vibrant orange turning into a pale yellow. Watching something fade is in itself an act of care, an acceptance of passing time. Things perish, and it’s fine. We celebrate and embalm youth and feel bad when anything ages, dents or dims. In this fear there’s the quintessence of the era we are living: the fear of losing, of missing out, of being replaced by someone or something faster, more efficient, more attractive, more hungry, more desperate.

I take the faces out of the recordings. I take the frame, the glass, the mount off the print and glue it to the wall.

Subtraction from the false perfection of a file - clean, inhuman, frictionless - and back toward the imperfection of the real world, which might be the only perfection there is. Bitmapping does this by misbehaving: the computer introduces its own noise and error, and never the same way twice, or so I like to believe.

I don’t save the result. Every time I need a print I run the reduction again, and every run comes out differently, so no two prints have ever been the same and none can be repeated. It’s the opposite of an edition: not one image copied many times, but one source that reinvents itself on every pass.

I like what the error finds: the grain, the wear, the things that don’t resolve cleanly. When the result is partly out of my hands, it takes away the burden of deciding everything. I don’t much trust the idea that we author our own outcomes anyway.

People are not absent from this work - they’re everywhere in it, digging the soil, foraging, planning, going to protests, dreaming. They’re just not inside the frame: they are around it.

This project is about imagination - about fuelling it - and imagination needs a gap to work in. Like reading: the words on the page are only a tool, and you supply the colours, the faces, the smells.