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 at the ENSP. 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.

The above is a selection of the emails.

The emails were sent in a structured matter, to hint to the performative aspect of the act. The items were selected along the process, increasing the absurdity of the choices in time.