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People who take the ferry from the village of Randwijk to the city of Wageningen might unexpectedly receive a story from Meike Legêne (1997). She works on the ferry as a ticket seller, but alongside this, she hands outs the stories she writes to the daily passengers. In these stories, fictional characters move through the same space as the travellers. Legêne calls this the everyday space, a public domain where people are unaware of themselves. ‘I want to tell stories about the feelings that arise in silence, that are hard to describe and have no fixed place. They are in danger of being devoured by all the ordinary stories of the world.’
In addition to being a writer, Legêne is also a sculptor and photographer. While her stories explore the subconscious being of people, in her sculptures she seeks to give that being a literal form – a body in the world.
Her latest work brings these different disciplines together. The photographs she makes outdoors are accompanied by text fragments, resulting in intimate visual poems with melancholy undertones. They represent tensions that exist in silence and evoke feelings of love, absence, and yearning for connections. The work is both haunting and peaceful, and perhaps precisely because of that, also timeless. The old photo frames evoke a homely and recognizable atmosphere. At the same time they also function as windows onto a different world. Clear and understated, the ‘everyday space’ here touches upon the mysterious space that lies beyond.
Text: Esther Darley
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)