How did you choose the actor you collaborated with?
I wanted to feel, as deeply as possible, the presence of the person I had lost, while also stepping back into the version of myself who loved him. We needed to embody the two people I remembered. I worked with a casting director to find someone who could move through this story with me, someone who could help me relive it.
What was it like to have an unknown body and person reenacting such personal memories?
It was painful. I didn’t want to go through it again, to lose him all over. The hardest part was knowing how it would end, and choosing to live through it once more.
Weren’t you afraid of distancing yourself from those memories, of losing the intimate bond you had with them?
Those memories already felt taken from me, that’s what inspired the project. They no longer existed as they once had; they’d been overwritten. In a way, that distance was already there. This process became a way of reclaiming them, of existing in the story a little longer before saying goodbye.
Writer Alice Notley says that writing is not therapy and that she still carries her grief. Is it the same for you with photography?
Art has given me a language to process, to feel. There’s a part of me that wants to rush that process, but it doesn’t work that way. I felt it deeply in my previous work: how much I wanted to let go of the story, to not be defined by it, and how it only became possible when I was actually ready.
