In diaristic pairings, images sit next to text and are annotated by location and date. The reader can engage with the story anachronistically by shuffling through time in the app. The narrative, which is broken up into short paragraphs, strategically removes the letter “e” from all words within the text, a nod to the French literary group Oulipo and its most famous exercise the lipogram. George Perec’s novel written in 1969, La Disparition (which serendipitously translates to The Void in English), employs the same lipogrammatic technique whereas Mustatea uses a modified GPT 2 text generator to assist in the linguistic restraints. La Disparition revolves around the disappearance of Anton Vowl, prompting his friends to investigate. As they delve deeper into the mystery, his friends encounter bizarre situations and characters. In both two texts, correlations are established between how the characters deal with absence and the coping mechanisms expressed in response to the rupture of reality during a time of crisis.

Voidopolis was originally adapted from a series of deleted Instagram posts. The book’s pages follow suit by going through a temporal erosion that can only be witnessed through the AR app. By hovering the device’s screen over the page, a digital image juts from the surface and jitters as it tries, struggling all the while, to ground itself to the printed image. The fragility of the wobbly, self-conscious technology is tangled up in how we see and what we remember, making loss both metaphor and medium.

Mustatea sources images that were once stock photographs. By their very nature, stock images essentialize desire by shortening the discursive space between capital and need. Mustatea removes humans from these images and in turn diffuses their implicit function. Stock photography is rendered useless without an object of desire. Through a process of Gaussian blurring the bounds of the image bleed onto the white page making space for amorphous topologies of color to emerge, where focus narrows to create depth to lead the eye, the blurred image obstructs vision and redirects attention back toward the photographic apparatus itself.

In the fields of neuroscience and psychology numerous researchers, most notably Bessel van der Kolk, have made connections between traumatic experience and memory plasticity. One key area of study is how PTSD can change the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex, all of which are involved in the formation, storage, and retrieval of memory. In this context, two primary forms of memory expression exist: vivid ideation which leaves room for little more than the all-consuming flashbacks, and the partial or complete suppression of memory altogether. Nikita’s journey through the baron cityscape, too, oscillates between remembering and forgetting. As she moves forward in time, the familiar geometry of the city falls out of sight. However, some errant pieces remain, exposed like archaeological remains being unearthed or buried (depending on how you are maneuvering through time). Here, Mustatea points to the psychological and fragmentary dimension of remembering traumatic events.

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two types of nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia involves attempting to reinstate the past as it was, often ignoring the complexities and contradictions of historical reality opting instead for a pristine replica of what was. On the other hand, reflective nostalgia dwells in loss, acknowledging the imperfections of the past and accepting it as wholly inaccessible. The reflective does not seek to recreate the past but understands nostalgia as a longing for a place or time that no longer exists or has never existed.

The photograph is uniquely a site of both restorative and reflective nostalgia. The unmanipulated image is taken with veracity in mind. I recall the countless images of refrigerated trucks, during the pandemic, that once stored food co-opted for the deceased when the morgues no longer had room. That’s why, however flawed the evidentiary potential of images may be, they still appeal to the viewer as a form of truth-telling. We want photographs to be a shorthand for what the world is. Voidopolis engages with this dialog by choosing photographic images to begin with but ultimately subverts them to move the conversation past the topic of veracity, which is already a well-trodden path of photographic discourse, toward a place of speculation and the possibilities embedded in new forms. 

In Nathan Jurgenson’s book, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media he writes, “As we have seen, photographic images, even after digital manipulation, always draw inspiration from both “scribe” and “poet” at once, varying in proportion depending on their subject and audience. Rather than just working against each other, the poet and the scribe also collude in the making of each image. It is not fully correct to say the poet and the scribe are poles at either end of a continuum, with scribe designating fact and poet fiction. Poetry is not synonymous with falsity; it is more a matter of a different, more elliptical approach to conveying ideas.”

I return to Svetlana Boym’s notion of reflective nostalgia. In her 2010 e-flux essay entitled The Off-Modern Mirror, she asserts that the “prism of vision” can “remap the contemporary landscape” by way of acknowledging the “interstices, disjunctures, and gaps in the present in order to co-create the future.” Here, it seems like Boym and Jurgenson are speaking directly to the conceptual underpinnings of Mustatea’s work. It’s the synthesis alongside the ambiguity–the need to document and the pull of erasure–that ultimately crack a narrative open, and allow us to perceive alternate modes of understanding and perhaps even if we’re lucky, ways of healing.