Rose Vidal

“From current events to photographs of my childhood, from artworks I observe to the images that impose themselves, images pass through me and shape my relationship with pain. I have never taken the trouble to look at them properly, probably because I never quite knew how to look at them. This is why they have quietly haunted me – not because they come back every day to terrify me, but because they are intertwined with one another, and then with my thoughts, like a vast spiderweb that each of my slightest gestures constantly reactivates, without ever resolving anything.
I have stopped trying to neutralize them – by pinning them like butterflies in airtight boxes, as we imagine we can deal with pain, fear, and frustration. I preferred to learn to draw them, to become familiar with their features. I magnetized them like photos arranged on the door of a fridge. Available, arranged for the gaze. Within reach of the hand that can exchange them, circulate them, evaluate them and highlight them. I shaped them to deform them, depicted them to reconfigure them.
In this magnetic field of images that haunt me, I form my ghosts. They, in return, inform me of the spirit of the times – mine, yours, ours. I compose a ghostly body, a foundation of presences more or less familiar, of loving voices and gestures that take over when I run out of breath or lose my words. I am loving toward my ghosts; and their love compels all my writing.”