According to legend, it was a young Corinthian woman who, trying to preserve the presence of her beloved as he was about to leave for war, made the first drawing by tracing on the wall the outline of his shadow projected in the darkness of their last night together. That was how art was born, out of love and loss.

Centuries later, after a long history of presences captured on canvas and paper, the invention of photographic techniques brought us back to the origin in that Corinthian night by once again allowing light and shadow to freeze on the surface they touch. This act of capturing—now almost banal—was born from the same need: to leave proof of what once was. Just like the prophet Gideon who, after being visited by an angel, needed the miracle to materialize into something physical that could outlive the vision— something to assure him it hadn’t been just his imagination, so that no one, not even himself, could deny what he had seen. Because experience, without a trace, resembles madness too closely.

But these images are mocking traps. The shadow traced or photographed is never the thing itself: it is its specter, its simulacrum, its halted echo—a silent image. And that unresponsive double laughs at us from the wall, reminding us of what once was and exposing what is no longer there, leaving us always unsatisfied. Like Medusa, punished with a museum instead of death, living surrounded by motionless bodies—remnants of encounters that never came to be. Her world is full, yet she is alone. She cannot touch without destroying. She cannot look without stopping time. She cannot live the now without seeing it turn into the past. It is the collector’s fate: to fool oneself each morning into thinking fossilized bones will be enough to bring back the flesh… and end the day accepting that there are no more dinosaurs.

And yet, not every trace is a trap, for there are encounters that break in like unexpected waves: they hit us, tumble us, make us swallow salt water until we lose all sense of the space. But by the time we finally manage to lift our heads above the surface, our swimsuits are full of sand, and the sea is calm again. In that moment, the trail of foam helps us reconstruct what we lived, the shape of our turmoil, and teaches us to swim in the current of memory.