Personal Notes: "Open it" Installation, February 4, 2020
For this work, I played three roles: cleaning lady, painter, and bookbinder. I wanted to speak about freedom and the quiet power of invisibility. To blur the lines between service and authorship, between what is shown and what is hinted at.
The room is almost empty. A single book sits in a corner: Why surfers should be fed? The title comes from a conversation between philosophers John Rawls and Philippe Van Parijs, over drinks, debating universal income. The phrase was later developed by Van Parijs in his 1991 article Why Surfers Should Be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income, in which he reflects on how society values leisure, work, and freedom — questions that quietly echo throughout this piece. “What about the most selfish guy,” Rawls asked, “the one who just surfs all day?”
I've always liked skater boys. And now I know why. There’s something honest in their rhythm — the way they wait, observe, move with the world rather than against it. Like surfers, they don’t take much, but they find flow. There’s dignity in that. And elegance.
When I think of this piece, I also think of my father. As a student, he once had a biology teacher who said: “The next person who looks out the window will never be invited back to class.” My father stood up, opened the window, leaned his elbows on the frame — and never went back. He didn’t need to. I've always loved that story. It stays with me. It says more about freedom than any theory I could write.
In a way, this piece was also a way of leaving an art school with elegance. Not through confrontation. But through an open window.
This room is like a sanctuary. The windows are open, letting the cold air in. The book, placed deliberately in a lonely corner, serves as a sacred object. Its presence invites visitors first to observe and contemplate the title and the book on the edge. For those truly curious, it is not necessary but an option to engage deeper by calling a number written inside. This leads to an SMS interaction, culminating in a flirty poetic invitation to meet at a waste treatment plant after the exhibition. Art is already there, in this city, more useful than even the Eiffel Tower. This part of the work transforms time and space, urging viewers to contemplate the existing beauty around us and open doors to new experiences.
The conversation unfolds in fragments. A message says: “The night begins to be black but it is far from being black, it is blue from turquoise blue, to royal blue and finally to midnight blue.” Another follows: “Forget the weather, our shit is burning. Do you hear the rain? It's human made but well made. Like me.”
The waste treatment plant becomes a sort of rendezvous. A place where fiction quietly meets infrastructure. The invitation is there, but the voice behind it fades.
I’ve always liked when things unfold discreetly. Like in Gossip Girl: you don’t always know who’s speaking, but the tension is built through absence, through suggestion. Florence Jung and Sophie Calle taught me that fiction and intimacy can shape space invisibly. That art can whisper, rather than shout.
The room breathes a little. The open window lets in the cold. The atmosphere — its fading light, its slowness — owes as much to painting as to weather. Sometimes I want to paint without pigment. Let the space carry its own life. Let almost nothing become everything.