Jamais-vu

The phenomenon of jamais-vu describes the uncanny moment when the familiar appears strangely new. Memories behave in the same way: they blur, fade, and resurface altered. What was once clear becomes elusive; what was once intimate becomes distant.

For this work, I reprinted my former portfolio – originally created in the context of fashion – page by page onto cotton fabric. Through the slow process of monoprinting, what once defined my past practice becomes unfamiliar, transformed into images that dissolve into layers of pigment, as if memory itself had settled into the weave of the fabric.

By transferring the logic of publishing and printmaking into textile, I extend a tradition of craft into another medium. The book becomes both archive and apparition, bound with open threads, holding fragments that refuse to remain fixed.

Its making required duration and devotion: fifteen hours of printing alone, not counting the cutting, binding, and finishing. Altogether, the work took around twenty-five hours of sustained care. In this sense, the work follows a principle I hold central – the only thing that produces quality is care. What usually belongs to the craftsman’s workshop enters the realm of the artist’s book, transforming tradition not by abandoning it, but by carrying it forward with equal attentiveness, into a different material language.

Here, innovation is not speed, but depth: a slow reconfiguration of what it means to remember, to repeat, to make.

The Jamais-vu-experience [ʒamɛˈvy] (French for never seen)
describes the opposite of the déjà vu experience. In this psychological
phenomenon, a person, circumstance, or place - although actually familiar - is perceived as completely foreign or new.