Cyanotype print of the ceiling of Notre Dame de l'Assomption in Paris. The image is part of the Paris Blue Prints series.

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I wanted to slip back into that old dream, to escape into its soothing promises. To shift my focus away from the fear and worry of today’s tensions. The Paris dream was always there. I don’t remember when or why it started. I thought I must have lived here in another lifetime, but it doesn’t matter. It was a driving force. “I am here, and I want to go there.” When, where, or how, I didn’t quite know. I tried many different doors, and it was an unexpected one that pulled me in when I had stopped trying.

Years after having transformed that wish into real experience, I have started looking back, trying to recollect what I was imagining and visualizing all those years ago, when living in Paris was my favorite daydream, before I had to navigate the bureaucracy, the language and the recent traumas, which I could never have included in the fantasy.

Those dreamed projections are still here, in parallel, and intertwined. It’s a question of sight, of decision, of choosing what to see. What does it look like, the undercurrent I feel running through both my present and the palpable past of this city?