Journal Intime

Journal Intime is a book without words. It tells a story through the physicality of its pages.

Fragile and delicate, it is made with pieces of objects (photos, texts, bark, moss, seaweed, sand, dollar bills, maps, petals, and other media) collected over years that have gained personal value and represent important and formative parts of my life, memories, embedded in the paper. Ephemeral, it is not meant to last. The binding is very minimal and consists of a cut out strip of a tropical plant leaf, highlighting once more the volatility of the piece.

On a personal level, Journal Intime acts as a testimony, a memoire, or a coming of age story, as it aims to give materiality to the visceral impacts of important life events and transient relationships. Turning valuable reminders into paper so it can be held, and then put down; turning the page, and letting it fade out, fall out, crumble, disassemble.

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On a broader level, papermaking, and paper as a medium, has historically been used as a vessel for information storage and has been one of the first steps in knowledge dissemination through space and its preservation through time. Choosing to make an ephemeral book, then, invites us to consider our temporality as a species, the extent of our impact through time, and our place within nature and the grand scheme of things.

Biodegradable, it also comments on the current neoliberal climate we exist in and the digital age: The audience is invited to manipulate the book, flip through, touch, and smell its pages. However, by the lack of words and context given, the audience relies on a storyteller to access its meaning, bringing us back to oral traditions.