personal project

FICTITIOUS LOCATION SPOTTING FOR A NON-EXISTING MOVIE

For years, I have been drawn to the dark, uneasy worlds of Lovecraft, Poe, and Stephen King. Stories where dread and wonder coexist. Over a period of eight years, I travelled through the United States with a camera, photographing places that felt strange, suspended in time. Not landmarks, but quiet, in-between spaces. The kind of places that could be anywhere, and yet seem like they belong to a story you already know. Many of these photographs were originally part of my earlier project American Diorama.

Later, while working as a set photographer, I began reading the scripts of the films I was working on. I was struck by how much atmosphere and emotion could unfold in just a few lines. That curiosity led me to search for scripts from some of my favourite films — Lynch, the Coen brothers, Nolan, and others — all found online. As I read them, something shifted. I started to recognise my own photographs in those scenes. It felt as if the images I had taken years earlier were already waiting for a story to step in.

I started pairing the two. I printed out script pages, struck through certain lines, then scanned and reprinted them. The alterations are subtle, but they shift the rhythm, the emotion, the suggestion. These fragments were shown together with the photographs in the 2020 exhibition (link), like a kind of location scouting for a film that doesn’t exist. The text is no longer script, but material. A ghost of narrative that hovers around the image.

For the book version (link) of the project, I worked the other way around. I took some of the photographs and wrote imaginary script pages of my own, inventing scenes inspired by what I saw in the frame. The image becomes the scene direction. The story begins after the shutter is pressed.

As part of this project, I also created a 30-minute projection (link). The photographs appear one after another on screen, while an actor with an American accent reads the altered script fragments. The projection itself becomes a kind of new movie, unfolding through voice and image. Each page is read like a scene, building a story that never existed — but somehow feels familiar. The soundtrack was composed by my husband, Daniel Balthasar, who accompanied me on all the trips through the United States. His music carries the atmosphere we both experienced, an echo of the places we saw and felt together.

2020

The script pages featured in this work are based on excerpts from screenplays found online. Each page has been artistically altered through manual redaction and recontextualisation. They are presented within a non-commercial, transformative art context. All original rights remain with their respective authors.