Sophie Calle x Anni Ernaux x Mike Marie

White.

Paper white, high-contrast neon white, fogged white, snow white, dust-white, half-moon white, white that vanishes before you can name it.

It looks at the window. Light moves across glass, a shifting reflection caught in the blink, the slight deviation of my gaze. The wind does not enter, but something does—a distant howling, unshaped. It thinks: no one knows how many grains of sand were pressed together to form this pane, half the size of a body. Its function came through fire—heat, pressure, warehouse floors, conveyor belts. It notices how dust settles, how it shifts, disappears without ceremony.

The air is ample, though polluted. We breathe regardless. An exchange without pause—new particles drawn in, old ones released. Motion leaves its traces, much like how light imprints itself on film. How many photographs does the body keep? Only the most intimate ones remain, refined through the narrowest of passageways.

Function emerges through skin. A boundary that separates the body from the world. Inside, organs compress, distort, restrict—an enclosure that wind does not reach. Protection, some might say. Isolation, others might add.

I open the window.

The shift is immediate. Cold presses into skin, white seeps in—piercing, numbing, almost too much. The eyes search, needing an anchor. Below, cars pass, cutting through whiteness, leaving color, shape, movement in their wake.

Perhaps a newborn, torn from the darkness of a closed chamber, feels this same estrangement in its first encounter with light. Sensation, a gift and a burden, pulls it into the shared fabric of existence. We anchor ourselves, or we are swept away.