Vestige

Vestige is a handmade accordion photobook and installation created during heartbreak. Through photographs, handwritten notes, and collage, it reflects on how we search for home in other people and what remains when that home disappears.

Vestige, 2024
Handmade double-sided accordion photobook and installation
637 cm x 30 cm

Vestige began as a personal response to heartbreak and the disorientation that followed. It asks what remains after a relationship ends, not in theory, but in the body, in memory, in daily life.

The work combines photographs, handwritten notes, and collage gathered during and after that period. Rather than presenting a linear story, it holds contradictions: tenderness alongside distance, attachment alongside withdrawal. It reflects the difficulty of separating love from grief when both exist at once.

The book opens in three directions. The central sequence begins with two split shadows and moves through questions of identity and self-confrontation. From the left, a strand unfolds around silence and loss. From the right, another traces intimacy, desire, and the cautious return of hope. Each path can be read independently, yet they remain physically connected.

When fully extended, the accordion reaches over six meters, transforming into an installation that viewers can walk around. Its structure mirrors the emotional process it documents, folding, unfolding, circling back, refusing neat closure while acknowledging the possibility of renewal.