The Blue Wind (2016)

“Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt”.

So begins the story of Andre Breton’s encounter with the enigmatic, and ultimately doomed figure of Nadja in the poets 1928 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. Nadja, or Leona Camille Ghislaine D. was twenty-four years of age when she met Breton by chance on the Rue Lafayette on October 4th 1926. Banished from her rural hometown for having a child outside of marriage, her existence was already  fragile and precarious when she encountered Breton. Struck by the other-worldly detachment of the young woman, her ghostliness and visionary quality, he pursued her for the following ten days, tracing an erratic trail through the streets of Paris. Inspired and also haunted by Breton’s novel, I journeyed to Paris in search of Nadja. Over a period of several weeks, using Breton’s text and Boiffard’s photographic plates from the original book, I followed the same routes, visited the same places. I was searching for evidence; any traces remaining, any indication of what her life might have been. In the process I created a visual and textual response. Using techniques similar to the Surrealists reliance on chance, and the later methods of Derive and Detournment, I navigated the city by day and night. As I searched for Nadja, I also wrote to Breton, weaving my own words around his, addressing him in the first person, imagining Nadja’s voice. On 24th March 1927 in the Spring following their brief affair, she was admitted for psychiatric care to the Perray-Vaucluse Hospital, and from there transmitted to a hospital near her home town of Lille, where she died in 1941 at the age of thirty-nine. She was never again free from incarcaration in a psychiatric institution. Breton never saw her again in person beyond that initial ten-day encounter, but her spectral presence lingers on haunting his 1928 novel.

This body of work includes a limited edition photobook and a series of larger archival prints.