Postcards From A Life (2015)

Postcards From A Life was created in response to Andre Breton’s novel Nadja. Here Breton describes his encounter with the enigmatic, and ultimately doomed figure of Nadja, or Leona Camille Ghislaine D., who he met by chance on the Rue Lafayette in Paris, on 4th October 1926. Struck by the otherworldly detachment of this young woman, her ghostliness, and visionary quality, Breton pursued her for the following ten days, tracing an erratic trail through the city. As in the writing of contemporaries such as Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Breton’s story is that of the Flaneur and wanderer on the threshold of the uncanny, who seeks and finds in the object of desire, not only a door to the subconscious, but ultimately the answer to the riddle of his own identity. Nadja is essentially a story of the haunting quality of memory, and of the ability or inability of the photograph to operate as it’s trigger, signifier and reflection. In 2012 and again in 2015, I travelled to Paris in search of Nadja, using Breton’s text and the original photographs from his novel, by Jacques Andre Boiffard. I followed the same routes through the city, looking for any traces of who Nadja was then, or might be today. In the process I reshot many of the original locations from the story, and drawing upon my own memory wrote a semi-autobiographical response to Breton, from Nadja’s perspective. My intention was to give voice to a side of the story, which had been so silenced, so erased. Part of the resulting work, Postcards from a Life, consists of ten diptychs, one for each day of the journey, both Breton’s and my own. My response is interwoven with historical and contemporary materials to construct an archive for Nadja, a materialization of evidential traces, or memories from a life that has otherwise vanished. Two other series of work The Blue Wind and Thoughts on a Bath in a Room Without Mirrors were also created as part of this cycle of work. 

Discussion of this work in depth.