The word “memory” is dangerous. Its sound stirs up multi-layered constructs, rising from the depths like fragments of what once was. Ghost footprints of the future.

Here I am—a material girl (“experience has made me rich”). And there is time, behaving like a compass needle caught in a magnetic anomaly. Time trembles, fractures, shifts direction. The older I get, the more fragmented it becomes. Memories, which change with every recall, lose their coherence, break away, and float freely. “It was” becomes “it was with me,” and eventually, “was it?” A solidification in amber of the eternal present, where disk defragmentation constantly occurs—segments shift, change referents, or lose them altogether.

Photographs serve as dynamic scans, marking milestones of growing up. They're part of my family album, and each one features me. But now: “was it?”—access denied.

The name of the project refers to Bob Perelman’s poem “China” (excerpt):

…It’s always time to leave.

…

Run ahead of your shadow.

A sister who looks at the sky at least once every ten years is a good sister. The landscape is teeming with cars.

The train takes you where it’s going.

Bridges with water in between.

People wandering along the endless concrete strips, they are heading towards the plane. Don’t forget what your boots and hat look like when you’re nowhere to be found…

”… in one stationery store in Chinatown, Perelman accidentally stumbled upon a book with photographs, the signatures and font of which obviously remained dead letters for him (or rather, material signifiers).

The sentences in the poem are his captions to the photographs. Their referents are other images, another text, and the “unity” of this poem does not lie in the text at all, but outside it, in the coherent unity of the missing book.” (Frederick Jameson “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture”).