Created in a bygone era when it served a real need, the directory today belongs to a species on the brink of extinction. Originally designed as a professional tool, it gradually entered private life, serving domestic and family purposes. It stood as a testimony to a society that sought to organize and make its connections visible, condensing in its columns a multitude of lives gathered in a simple list.
Today, social networks appear as the heightened version of this old directory. As digital instruments of collective communication, they replicate and amplify the logic of classifying individuals, which the printed directory once initiated, but now in an endless, dematerialized flow. In the directory, names were printed in shared ink; I now cover them with another black. Through a patient and repetitive gesture, akin to abstract calligraphy, I coat each page with India ink until it becomes completely dark, transforming these vanished names into a unified, dense, and silent surface.
Page by page, the object shifts. It sheds its identity as a book to assert itself as a sculpture. Stripped of its original function and emptied of its collective dimension, the directory becomes, for me, an autonomous body: a monochrome volume, detached from time, bearing a singular presence that alone embodies both erasure and the persistence of memory.
