I Used to Kiss a Lot

I Used to Kiss a Lot is a publication around reconnecting with one's body through photography, self-portraiture, destruction & reconstruction, in hope of feeling a new kind of love in a foreign place.

I Used to Kiss a Lot is a love letter with no recipient, investigating intimacy and its complexities while navigating the isolation of moving to a new country.

Images made in the intimate setting of a room or a bed show the body in positions that mirror gestures of physical closeness, while alone.

Through the reproducible sequence of movements, the body becomes an instrument to access, navigate and stage memories of love and its making, that get ritualistically deconstructed and reconstructed, over and over again.

With an obsessive process of printing, destroying, and rephotographing images from an archive taken across two countries, the book destroys the work while simultaneously rebirthing it into a new form.

The Amorphophallus Titanum, or Corpse Flower, weaves its way through the book, shaping the narrative as it unfolds. Known for its scarcity and brief life, it takes ten years to bloom and lives for just a single day before it dies. Its unsettling fragrance of rotting flesh, combined with decaying hues of red, purple, and brown, mirrors both the transience of intimacy and the impermanence of being.

This same cycle of destruction and creation shaped the text, which was composed by searching for the words self, intimacy, and love across multiple messaging apps, extracting these conversations from their original contexts, fragmenting them, and piecing them back together to form a new understanding.