ghosts

ghosts

These past autumn days, my home has been my studio — a place for living, processing, working, and exhibiting. Moving around a lot in the past years my sense of home has become fragmented. So, when I arrived in Paris, I asked myself, why am I trying to make things that rely on separating myself from where I am?

Especially since the work I do derives from the work I’ve done.

My earlier projects have explored architecture, material memory, and the tension between built form and natural reclamation. For the Open Studio, I present Ghosts, a new body of work that turns outer environments to the inner and urban fabric — the traces people leave behind in cities. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s concept of “extimacy,” this installation examines how the self leaves both physical and immaterial marks in the world.

On display you find large-scale drawings which tell stories about imprints of lived urban surfaces, acting like archaeological documents of fleeting encounters. I became fascinated by how the surface of an everyday objects — like a drain — can hold shared records of presence and passage.

Upstairs you find moving boxes that extend this inquiry into transitory structures. They are containers talking about movement, displacement, loss and memory, holding the residues of lived space.

They embody fragility and human presence through what they once carried.

Altogether, the installation unfolds at the threshold between public and private — between expansion and rhythm, habit and dwelling. It reflects a kind of present absence: gestures, traces, and behaviours borrowed from others, briefly inhabiting our own space.

Patrick Ostrowsky , 21th October 2025 - edited by Lamisse Hamouda