The Line of Ghosts

Two videos are played back to back. In the first, a close-up of the artist’s mouth recounts an anecdote about Franz Kafka, relayed by Gilles Deleuze to his students, in which amorous letter writing is understood as an exchange mediated by an irreducible distance.

In the second, a hand caresses the surface of the screen in an attempt to reach the lover’s body on the other side. In the early twentieth century, Kafka suggested that technical means of communication at a distance function as intermediaries between ghosts: the message received never coincides with the one sent, as each subject’s desire rewrites it within the intimacy of their own experience. From this premise, the work unfolds a closed circuit of touch and language in which the illusion of contact is revealed as a form of narcissistic withdrawal.

Produced during the State of Alarm declared in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, both pieces condense an experience of desire, distance and projection in which the encounter with the other is always traversed by the impossibility of stepping outside oneself.