Talk to Me

Talk to Me “It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it (...)” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx* Anaïs Horn’s project expands her ongoing investigation into the spectral presence of objects and spaces, drawing direct influence from Hervé Guibert’s L’Image fantôme (1981). In this seminal text, Guibert explores the elusive nature of photography—its ability to preserve and betray, to animate and annihilate — an inquiry that deeply resonates with Horn’s engagement with intimacy, absence, memory, and the unseen. “I feel completely empty now that I’ve told you this story. It’s my secret. Do you understand?” Secrets, as Guibert writes, have to circulate. In Talk to Me, Horn stages this perpetual exchange through layered interventions. Using personal, archival and found materials, she manifests the installation as a site of tension between revelation and concealment: oversized silvered Cimaruta amulets, historically worn as protection against the evil eye, form a wall-bound constellation; large scale black-and-white photos of interiors of family and friends’ homes, taken by Horn’s grandfather in the 1960s, reappear as mirrors with Horn herself intervening as a spectral figure, entering the photographic space, appearing, dissolving, merging with forgotten places. Archival still lifes staging her grandmother’s jewelry function as palimpsests of personal and photographic lineage. She reworks these images through hand-coloring and erasures, layering traces of presence and loss. A reconstructed crime scene — echoing the burglary where her grandmothers’ bequeathed jewelry was stolen—transforms into a sonic body, embedded with exciters that transmit electromagnetic recordings from her child- hood home. These recordings reference EVP (electronic voice phenomenon), layered with a ticking watch and the solitary sound of an old, empty jewelry box playing. Together, they become an acoustic evocation of both absence and presence. “Photography is also an act of love.” Like Guibert, Horn’s work is an act of devotion to what disappears. Mirrors punctuate the space, amplifying the work’s preoccupation with protection, superstition, and the instability of images. Through performative, sonic, and material gestures, she constructs a liminal space between past and present, the visible and the invisible, where memory flickers, where secrets, like images, resist finality — always circulating, always in transit. *Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994, 2006), p. xviii. Wendy Vogel: Inhabiting Secrets “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” Diane Arbus wrote in 1971. This body of work originates from secret photographs, secret symbols, secret vibrations. In “Return to a Beloved Image,” Hervé Guibert describes taping a disintegrating photograph to his chest to preserve it, thus transferring the image to his own skin. Anaïs inhabits a mysterious series of interior images taken by her grandfather. She turns the photographs into a lifesize stage. She haunts them. She becomes a specter. She returns to the idea of jewelry as inheritance, and the intimate violation of a robbery where jewels passed down from her grandmothers were stolen. In order to start a new life, does the past have to be severed? In the jewelry still lifes photographed by her grandfather, two necklaces become nearly personified. I consider the jewelry images as a type of portrait. The jewels, mined from the earth, hold the imprint of the body. The smooth pearls that he photographs invite touch. They drape against a mirror in a languid pile. They snake around a craggy suspended object (a tree branch? a sculpture?) Situated atop rocks, they relax into the jagged contours. A metal choker with a chic pendant possesses a different character altogether — rigid, protective. It encircles the neck of a vase. It forms a frame against a portrait drawing. These portraits become the backdrop for a series of artistic interventions that combine hidden images with hidden letters, divulging long-concealed family origins. Anaïs sends me the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET). Developed by the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, the test measures social intelligence by evaluating how well one can discern emotions by looking at photographs of individuals’ eyes. I score “very high,” though the results inform me that I was one per cent less accurate when reading the eyes of women, and overall less accurate at discerning among negative emotions. I think it’s because every image of a woman’s face is so obviously staged, manicured, frozen. They look like vintage analog photographs, but all traces of motion and wrinkles have been erased. (Retouching is an old art.) When I am asked to choose the emotions corresponding to the pictures of women, I keep clicking the terms that suggest a male gaze: “desiring,” “fantasizing,” “flirtatious.” Is it my perception, or the creation of the image itself? According to Natural Foundations of the Evil Eye Phenomenon, “experimental studies involving individuals with borderline personality disorder have revealed a heightened sensitivity and an enhanced ability to detect the emotions of others based on their facial expressions.” Seventy-five percent of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder are women. My therapist tells me the diagnosis of borderline will itself fade out, due to its specious criteria and the inherent sexism in who receives it. Characterized by extreme emotional instability, borderline disorder originates in complex trauma and resulting hypervigilance — the things that these people see, which cannot be unseen, they then see in others. Fear rewires the mind, like a secret super power. Janet Wirth-Cauchon’s book Women and Borderline Personality Disorder (2001) notes “there has been an increasing recognition among feminist observers that the label ‘borderline’ may function in the same way ‘hysteria’ did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for women.” She adds an observation from Mary Ann Jimenez: “What distinguishes borderline personality disorder from hysteria is the inclusion of anger and other aggressive characteristics … If the hysteric was a damaged woman, the borderline woman is a dangerous one.” The borderline, the hysteric, the witch, the fortune teller. Who casts the spell and who has the power to lift the curse? Their archetypes are bound up with one another — vilified, powerful, threatening. Anaïs has created replicas of cimaruta amulets, an Italian folk object to counteract the evil eye. She covers her amulets in silver leaf, the same alchemical metal that makes a photograph come to life. The cimaruta derive their shape from the rue plant and combine charms from Catholic and pagan symbols, including the moon, key, dagger, and sacred heart. The moon hearkens to the ancient goddess Diana — deity of the moon and the hunt, and the protector of women. Plant medicine, folk wisdom, and superstition combine in this talisman, which also made its way into Renaissance art depictions of the Madonna and child. Does the fear of the evil eye equate to a fear of photography? As Susan Sontag writes in On Photography (1977), superstitions about the medium persisted for years. And not only among (in her words) “primitive people.” The early photographer Nadar described Balzac’s “vague dread” of the Daguerreotype process: “every body in its natural state was made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films … each Daguerreian operation was therefore going to lay hold of, detach, and use up one of the layers of the body on which it focused.” Hervé Guibert called photographs “an impressionable material that welcomes spirits.” If the photograph takes something away, what might enter its place? Does the evil eye cast a spell, or reveal something wicked that was already causing an affliction? I’ve never dabbled in anything close to spirit photography, but I have had my aura portrait taken twice. Inspired by Durga Chew-Bose’s aura photography session in Too Much and Not the Mood (2017), I went to Magic Jewelry in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The perpetual line outside the small storefront — which sells stones, jewels and spiritual paraphernalia — moves relatively swiftly; like most businesses in the city, they know how to optimize for a crowd. My first picture, in April 2023, revealed a dark red cloud obscuring my body. While I waited for an employee to give me an aura reading, I glanced at a chakra system diagram on the store’s glass counter. It said that red indicated an abundance of root chakra energy: a physical life force resulting in passion, grounding or rage. I wondered if red meant the correct balance of those energies. “You work too much,” said the woman assigned to interpret my aura. Tough to argue with that statement in New York. My second photograph, from September 2024, showed a series of green and blue bands radiating from my body. “My aura improved!” I said. I don’t remember exactly how my second aura-reader responded, but the gist was that I’d overcorrected. I’d now risk compromising too much for the sake of harmony. I have some skepticism about the personalized accuracy of the readings, but I would go back for another photograph. If nothing else, they are a beautiful secret of a secret, illuminating in dazzling color the contours of a parallel energy field around us.