Lost & Found
in collaboration with Jeri Poll, 2021
In October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I moved to Arles, France, to pursue a master’s degree at the école nationale supérieure de la photographie. I arrived to a new establishment which itself had recently moved into a new building. Restrictions, facemasks, and minimizing social contact were the norm.
One day, I receive an email titled “lost & found” by Jeri Poll, then receptionist there. A lost item photographed, for its owner to come and retrieve it. I decided to poke the sterile environment I was in with a bit of playfulness and humor.
I decided to lose items on purpose. Jeri would be in on it.
The work became a visual conversation about communication and attempting to find one’s place in a new environment, a way to deal with language barriers and overcoming everyday hardships through humor. It deals with loss; the loss of the familiar, where one once belonged, the loss of communication in that particular period of time, the loss the other. Many losses. Then Jeri shared a poem by Elizabeth Bishop that tied the whole project together.
The work is a site-specific and time-specific intervention that took the form of emails.
