Thank you, Goodbye, and Good Riddance (2020)
The image on the left was taken in Dover on the 31st of October 2019, on the second Brexit deadline, after having been delayed from the originally planned date of the 29th of March. After Article 50 was extended for a second time, the image on the right was taken on January 31st 2020, the official Brexit date, close to the border between Romania and Moldova, the latter not a member state of the European Union. The first photograph is looking East, while the second is looking West. Both images are looking at the continental European Union in-between them and, in a way, at each other. The pair explores whether representing history in the making is truly possible - if history is the science of what has already been experienced, it fundamentally deals with the past. However, can photography have an intuition of relevant times and spaces? The photographs only hint at a heterogenous mass of land and the masses of people inhabiting it, whose destinies are entangled together.
‘Thank you, goodbye, and good riddance!’ was the farewell message of Irena Andrassy, Croatian ambassador to the EU, to the UK in the aftermath of Brexit. It is believed ‘good riddance’ was a mistranslation of ‘good luck’.
