Love Affair
2015
Intimacy as a
Corrupted Archive
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Love Affair extends my inquiry into the instability of documentary truth from public space and territory into the realm of intimacy. If earlier projects questioned the image as document of the city, the landscape, or the nation, this work turns inward to examine how technologies of recording, storage, and proof structure affective memory and personal identity.
Developed after a period of professional exhaustion in documentary television and the dissolution of an intimate relationship, the project addresses a central question: what happens when the archive to be intervened is no longer collective or institutional, but emotional and personal? In contemporary visual regimes, intimacy is not lived solely in the body; it is externalized into devices, clouds, servers, and image repositories. When a relationship ends, it is not only the bond that fractures, but also the visual infrastructure that sustained a shared identity.
The work is based on five photographs that survived an attempted digital erasure following the breakup. Rather than functioning as sentimental remnants, these images became sites of conflict—documents that continued to operate as proof of a relationship that no longer existed. Drawing from critical theories of the archive (Derrida) and from practices that expose intimacy as a constructed record (Sophie Calle), Love Affair shifts the focus from narrative disclosure to the technical anatomy of the image.
Each photograph was opened at the level of its source code and intervened through hexadecimal editing. Personal confessions were embedded directly into the binary structure of the file, corrupting the image from within. The text is not visible as narrative overlay, but operates as data that destabilizes the file’s integrity. As a result, the images fracture: bodies lose coherence, surfaces distort, and the photograph ceases to function as transparent evidence of the past.
In Love Affair, glitch is not an aesthetic effect but a conceptual method. Confession does not clarify memory; it sabotages it. The intimate image becomes unreliable, unstable, and materially altered, revealing how affective memory is entangled with technical systems of storage and validation. The project frames romantic rupture as a crisis of the archive and positions the corruption of the document as a way to interrupt the power images exert over subjective identity.
Within my broader practice, Love Affair marks a decisive turn toward the body and vulnerability as sites of research. The documentary impulse—to record, preserve, and verify—is exposed as a force that also colonizes private life. By corrupting the intimate archive, the work proposes a critical strategy for reconfiguring memory, authorship, and the politics of truth at their most personal scale.