If this show is about long-distance lovers,
let’s start with ourselves.

We met in Delphi in 2019.
I fell in love with you—not romantically, exactly—
but with the feeling that this would be forever.

It felt urgent
and not urgent.

Postcards.
Visitations.
Long nights in each other’s company or sometimes on the phone,
in between flings,
in between all the different kinds of love,
you were always there.

How do you sustain love?
How do you hold someone?
How do you make someone feel close?

Perhaps distance is a comfortable place to maintain love
because you never have to face yourself. But that distance is also a chasm in which we often lose ourselves.

We have spent years communicating through voice notes. We’ve sent them across continents, while overwhelmed by other relationships, through revelations and periods of confusion alike. A voice note enters your phone. You do not know what is inside it. It’s a black box until you listen. To a confession, or a seduction. It can be a warning or produce a wound.

So?

What does the voice carry
that the letter cannot?

What survives the failure of silence?

if we could just talk in person is the third collaborative exhibition by Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: an on-again, off-again correspondence conducted against the accumulating ruins.

You’re so vain.
You probably think this show is about you.

Don’t you?

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