2022. Photography, Video, Archive and Text.

Darkness, light. What do we choose not to see, and what have we become numb to seeing? Road markings are something I am numb to, barriers, fences, wires, the structures of modern society that aim to control our movement, doing so successfully, and as such, we are completely blind to their presence, we tune them out.

Road markings are not physical, what else is non-physical that guides where we do and don’t go, what we do and don’t do, what we see and what we don’t? Light itself. 

Artificial light is a tool of governance no different from paint or barbed wire. It can be as violent as a gun, as revolutionary as a paving stone, and it is a force as tidal as the moon. Light is the most primal system of control.

"Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!" is a translation of a phrase found as graffiti during the May 1968 protests throughout France. It stemmed from the history of barricade building in Paris. Paving stones would be ripped up to build the barricades and thrown from windows - beneath them was a bed of sand. I became enamoured with these ideas of resisting the modern urban environment as a symbol of capitalist control. 

The process of creating this piece was informed largely by Guy Debord's theory of the dérive.