Lately I have been living in a rhythm of hesitation spending most of my time inside, rarely stepping out. My flat became both a refuge and a quiet tension as its rooms seem to echo the stillness and anxiety that move through me. Within this fragile balance, I began to notice how certain spaces quietly register my inner state, almost as if the environment was observing me back.
The bathroom sink became a point of focus not because of its function, but because it kept changing without ever changing. Each day it presented a new composition: a toothbrush shifted slightly, a glass misplaced, a piece of clothing appeared where it didn’t belong. By photographing it every morning and evening, I realised that no image ever truly repeated itself. What seemed identical revealed subtle deviations: a shadow displaced, a residue drying differently, a small object interrupting the expected order.
These minor transformations started to form a pattern that mirrored emotional fluctuation. The sink reflected not hygiene, but presence – whether I had the strength to clear things away, or whether I allowed them to accumulate. Morning photographs often felt like forecasts, hinting at how the day might unfold. Evening ones became records of exhaustion, of care, of avoidance.
Following Georges Perec’s idea that the infra-ordinary can reveal the hidden logic of daily life (Species of Spaces and Other Places, 1974, pp. 53–59), I treated these observations as a way of reading emotion through the everyday. Photography became a slow instrument for measuring rhythm. Roland Barthes wrote that “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” (Camera Lucida, 1981, p. 4), and this paradox guided my process where each photograph marking both the event and its disappearance.
As I kept observing, the sink began to resemble a diagram of time. Lines of water and marks of use acted as drawings, traces of gestures I no longer remembered performing. That is what Tim Ingold describes as “records of movement” (Lines: A Brief History, 2007, p. 43). These marks, like thoughts, appeared and vanished, forming a visual rhythm of presence and loss.
Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000) also framed my approach. Like her gleaners collecting what others leave behind, I gathered fragments of my own living: residue, moisture, scattered objects as small evidences of being. Observation here became a form of care, an attempt to recover what usually escapes attention.
Through this process, the domestic turned into a silent archive – a space where repetition designs emotion, and where even the smallest trace becomes a map of thought.