While wandering in solitude across many countries and cities, I stumbled upon countless ‘remnants’ of people through abandoned tangible materials. Misshapen cigarette butts strewn across deserted café tables with the remainders of coffee, a fallen ice cream cone in a sewer perhaps once belonging to a child heartbroken from the loss of his sweet treat; used and dried-up acrylic paints on a lonely dinner table with an empty bottle of wine, old fruits sitting gloomily under dim fluorescent lighting in the dark night, pigeons picking up the leftover crumbs of pastries people left behind on tables; and the way the sunlight plays upon shadows in a city space. My encounters with these arrangements of objects offer a look into the cosmopolitan world - including the cities Florence, London, Paris, and New York - and the people living in it. The photographs are portraits in of themselves and vestiges of moments long gone. The array of coffee cups with banana peels compiled in a heaping mess depict the group of friends once sitting at the table smoking together and sharing laughs while the small and empty espresso cup on a clean and undisturbed tabletop presents the quiet and possibly lonely nature of the person who left it behind. Then there are the settings of kitchens, dining tables, and loud birthday parties where the rooms are sprinkled with the residues of food, letters, and pill bottles posing the curiosity of what had occurred in those intervals of time in the day or night; and the meeting of sunlight to shadow on the streets and buildings littered with the years of human footprints. The orchestration of seemingly meaningless entities in public and private spaces are representations of forgotten memories of a city, past moments that we usually pass by without any notice. They narrate stories of the people and events that once occupied the areas even though the objects are still detached from those faces that we cannot see or know but left to the mind’s eye to create its own vision of what once was. My solitary travels across the world led me to these observations and this project; I sought companionship in the mere echos and traces of personages - regardless of whether they were adults, children, or birds - and found intimacy that is perhaps rare to come by in places with cosmopolitan attributes.
I am always more present in the past. February - March 2019
