Replaced
A story of love, loss, and the fragile boundary between memory and reconstruction,
Replaced considers the quiet violence of realizing that intimacy can continue without you, and that
gestures, places, and memories once believed to be singular are repeated with someone else, transforming what once felt sacred into something unsettlingly interchangeable.
In response to this loss, I staged reenactments with an actor, reconstructing moments of tenderness alongside rupture.
Moving through the unstable terrain of memory, the work explores how desire can distort, embellish, and erase.
What once unfolded beyond my control is reclaimed through direction, framing, and performance, turning grief into something deliberately reimagined.
Each scene becomes both a return and a revision, an attempt to hold on a little longer while existing somewhere between memory and imagination, before finally releasing both the man I once loved and the version of myself who loved him.
2026
I ask the actor to dance with me.
He guides me to the center of the room.
I hum Sinatra in his ear.
The camera captures us from a neighborhing apartment.
For a moment, I forget it’s there.
On a cliffside in Capri,
I wear the same white linen dress.
I am tense.
“Make me laugh,” I whisper.
The Super8 films us.
I am trying to reenact a memory.
To return to a feeling.
In Nice, I lead the actor to the room we once shared.
I am having trouble breathing.
I open the balcony door to let air in.
“This is where we’re going to argue,” I tell him.
At night, as we walk through town.
I tell him I can’t do this anymore.
“Fight for me, convince me to stay,” I direct the actor,
enacting a moment that never happened.
On our final shoot, the actor and I hold each other in the shower.
“You should want happiness for him,” he tells me.
“What if I am not there yet?” I ask.
“I thought you were over him,” he says. “Isn’t that what the project is about?”
