The zine »Talk to Me« was first published on the occasion of Anaïs Horn’s exhibition »Talk to Me« at FOTOHOF, interweaving works from the multidisciplinary project, excerpts from Hervé Guibert’s »Ghost Image«, material from extensive research, archival fragments, found materials, and a newly commissioned text by curator and writer Wendy Vogel (NYC).

»It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it (…)«

(Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994, 2006), p. xviii.)

»Talk to Me«, 2024-2025

Anaïs Horn’s project expands her ongoing investigation into the spectral presence of objects and spaces, drawing direct influence from Hervé Guibert’s »L’Image fantôme« (1981). In this seminal text, Guibert explores the elusive nature of photography—its ability to preserve and betray, to animate and annihilate — an inquiry that deeply resonates with Horn’s engagement with intimacy, absence, memory, and the unseen.

»I feel completely empty now that I’ve told you this story. It’s my secret. Do you understand?« Secrets, as Guibert writes, have to circulate. In »Talk to Me«, Horn stages this perpetual exchange through layered interventions. Using personal, archival and found materials, she manifests the installation as a site of tension between revelation and concealment: oversized silvered Cimaruta amulets, historically worn as protection against the evil eye, form a wall-bound constella- tion; large scale black-and-white photos of interiors of family and friends’ homes, taken by Horn’s grandfather in the 1960s, reappear as mirrors with Horn herself inter- vening as a spectral figure, entering the photographic space, appearing, dissolving, merging with forgotten places.

Archival still lifes staging her grandmother’s jewelry function as palimpsests of personal and photographic lineage. She reworks these images through hand-coloring and erasures, layering traces of presence and loss.

A reconstructed crime scene — echoing the burglary where her grandmothers’ bequeathed jewelry was stolen—transforms into a sonic body, embedded with exciters that transmit electromagnetic recordings from her childhood home. These recordings reference EVP (electronic voice phenomenon), layered with a ticking watch and the solitary sound of an old, empty jewelry box playing. Together, they become an acoustic evocation of both absence and presence.

»Photography is also an act of love.« Like Guibert, Horn’s work is an act of devotion to what disappears. Mirrors punctuate the space, amplifying the work’s preoccupation with protection, superstition, and the instability of images.

Through performative, sonic, and material gestures, she constructs a liminal space between past and present, the visible and the invisible, where memory flickers, where secrets, like images, resist finality — always circulating, always in transit.

Anaïs Horn, * in Graz, Austria; lives and works in Paris and Lunigiana, Italy.