Mise en relation – and some notes on the work of Florence Jung
On the 18th of November 2025, an institutional director sent an introduction email to a French artist and an Italian curator. This is, officially, how it began. Three lines. Polite. Efficient. The kind of email destined to disappear as soon as it has done its job. And yet, it lingered. It did what ghosts do best: refused to fully disappear.1 Emails were exchanged. They were written in that neutral tone we adopt when we don’t yet know who we’re dealing with and fear revealing too much too soon. It’s always hard to understand someone through email. Everyone sounds smarter, calmer, more balanced. Or worse, everyone sounds the same.2
Florence Jung3, however, didn’t.
There was something in her writing–an attention, a softness–that made me pause. A sense of kindness and care that felt out of place in the professional ecosystems we navigate, where urgency often passes for depth.4 I tried, of course, to do my research. I always do. Obsessively. It’s my way of managing expectations. But Florence resisted visibility. No Instagram. No online archive of studio selfies or glamorous exhibition openings. Barely any installation shots. A few texts.5 That was it.6
Not finding enough information, I went to buy one of her publications, New Office: The Ads 31.03.2019 – 31.03.2020 (Paris: JBE Books, 2020). It reminded me of an early 2000s teenage obsession of mine, Carol Bolt’s The Book of Answers (New York, Hyperion, 1999), where you choose a page at random seeking responses to an existential, usually pointless question. I started doing the same with Florence’s book. The answers were surprisingly direct:
“If you haven’t heard or said anything new in a long time, call +33751514597”7
“If you’re suspicious of anything that claims to be real, call +33751514597”8
“f you haven’t made a sincere effort in ages, call +33751514597”9
I became slightly obsessed. This was not secrecy. It was atmospheric.10
I started, however, to wonder, quite seriously, whether she existed at all. This idea—Florence as a possible fiction—began to haunt me quietly. Like dust accumulating on furniture you can no longer see until the light hits it just right.11 How could someone be so present in discourse and yet so absent visually? Was she a collective invention? A curatorial rumour? By the time we agreed to meet in Paris, I was almost disappointed at the idea of her materializing.
Our first meeting took place on a winter day in Paris. The café was near the Fondation Pernod Ricard.12 It was small, reassuringly untrendy. The kind of place that doesn’t try to seduce you. I arrived ten minutes early, as I always do. Even when I try to be late, I arrive exactly on time. Something about my internal clock. I suspect it’s anxiety masked as punctuality.
Florence appeared without warning. Or perhaps she had been there longer than I realised. We were both dressed in black from head to toe.13 Not in a theatrical way, just minimal, functional, almost defensive. As if neither of us wanted to be fully visible. A familiar gesture in the art world: either you perform presence, or you disappear. No shades of grey. You are either there, or you’re not. She ordered an allongé. I had a noisette. I smoked too much.
We talked. Easily. About life, first. Then love. Then sex—without embarrassment or performance. More like circling topics, testing their edges. About the strength it takes to be a woman without turning that strength14 into a slogan. About joy, and how suspicious it can feel. About despair, and how familiar it is.
It was just a first semi-professional meeting.15 Possibly the beginning of a friendship. Possibly not. The distinction felt thin.
At times, I had the unsettling feeling that Florence was both ahead of me and slightly behind.16 That she was observing something I had not yet noticed. Or that I was catching up to a version of myself she already knew. The boundary between her presence and my projection became unclear.
Later, alone, I tried to recall her face. It shifted. Each attempt produced a slightly different version. Not incorrect. Just unstable. As if memory itself had become unreliable.17
I reread the introduction email.
On the 18th of November 2025, an institutional director sent an introduction email to a French artist and an Italian curator. It no longer felt like a beginning. It felt like a loop.18 Like a trace that kept reactivating itself. A message that was less about connection than duplication.19
Florence Jung does not produce images. She produces situations that attach themselves to other situations, moving through people, repeating with slight changes. They leave witnesses unsure of where the experience ends and where it begins.
Ghosts are not always what appears in front of you. Sometimes they are what slowly convinces you that what you are following was already inside20 you.
- I happened to be in Paris at the time these emails were being exchanged. Unexpectedly, or not, Florence Jung had just opened a solo show at Galerie Allen. No end date had been announced, which I interpreted as a casual omission. Still, something about that absence stayed with me. The following morning, I decided to go. When I arrived, it became clear that the missing end date was not an oversight, but a work titled Jung109, listed on the room sheet as the last piece of the exhibition. I remembered reading somewhere —though I couldn’t recall whether it was in the space itself or on the gallery’s social media—that seven scenarios would be activated in the exhibition, whilst other unmentioned ones may also appear. I started speculating what the others might be. The absence of an end date feels like a refusal to disappear. It persists in the space, a non-present presence extending beyond the exhibition’s apparent closing. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - The kind of writing that makes you question if everyone has turned to AI tools to write for them: a neoliberal attempt for efficiency, or the dumbing down of a globalised society—an editor’s worst nightmare. (Editor’s note) ↩︎
- Florence Jung creates scenarios. In the absence of images, these script-based situations circulate through spoken and written accounts. Yet none of this is fictional, each scenario is real. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - Florence’s work is not kind or soft, but one that demands attention and time. It resists urgency, as it is not frontal, nor straightforward. It could even be described as unsatisfying for some, as it is deeply conceptual and non-photogenic in a time when everyone is used to instant gratification and trendy aesthetics. (Editor’s note)
↩︎ - Her website seemed to extend the same logic. A blank white homepage with a single, hyperlinked text line: “This file may contain the information you’re looking for.” I clicked. A 174-page PDF opened, entirely black and white. A full reader on her practice. Completely coherent, and yet somehow still difficult to fully grasp. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - Any physical or digital evidence of the scenarios’ existence must be destroyed or dispersed at the end of each activation. (Artist’s note)
↩︎ - I tried calling the number on the page. The line was busy. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - After a couple of days, I decided it was time to try calling that number again. Like Jung107— a work that consists of twelve calls from a private number to make the phone ring—I called twelve times. In a row. The phone rang each time. No one picked up. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - I didn’t renew the phoneline I used for New Office, so the number returned to circulation and was reassigned. Someone later told me they once reached a woman when calling it. (Artist’s note)
↩︎ - Atmospheric, like walking down a street and a small plaque catches your eye. You stop. Cabinet de Voyance – Consultations sur rendez-vous. As you read, something shifts behind you, maybe a rat. Then you discover it’s a scenario of Florence Jung (Jung105). It’s unclear whether it was seen or imagined. But maybe it doesn’t really matter. This instability is precisely where the work belongs, somewhere close to the logic of psychic reading. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - Within a column dedicated to ghosts and archives, we feel that the matter that bridges the ambiguous gap between the two subjects is, perhaps, dust. Rene Char, “Yeux vous êtes les éclaireurs médiums du néant […] Nous sommes entrés dans l’écart […] Biens des peuples silencieux / Poussière tu m’émeus aux larmes;” Dépendance de l’adieu, 1936. (Editor’s note) ↩︎
- Florence Jung presented a solo exhibition from 19 November 2024 to 01 February 2025 at the Fondation Pernod Ricard. This show did have an end date. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - The fact that we were both entirely dressed in black immediately brought to mind a work of Florence’s I had come across a few days earlier, Jung92, for which a philosophy professor received an anonymous package containing a black scarf, black jacket, black gloves, a ski mask, saline solution and a burner phone with the professor’s name already saved in its contacts. For a moment, it felt as if we could have been the intended recipients—only missing the mask and the saline solution. The thought made me smile. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - While going through the 174-page PDF, I came across this passage describing a piece called Jung85–89 (Lou Ferrand, 2024), in which five women act according to different instructions: “La première partira loin de chez elle durant quelques jours sans rien dire à personne. La seconde apprendra une langue rare. La troisième passera un permis. La quatrième subira une transformation physique radicale. La dernière dissimulera une importante somme d’argent liquide chez elle.” Strength lies with those who never have to appear. (Author’s note) ↩︎
- She never described her work. I never asked. Nothing happened that could be reported. No project. No plan. And yet, when we left, it felt as if something had already been completed. Or repeated.Weeks later, we decided to meet again. No reason. Just the pleasure of continuing that non-conversation we had started. We agreed to go for a walk in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. No direction. We talked about everything and nothing. The conversation did not build. It hovered. It felt like we had known each other for years. Like we had worked intensely on a project together and forgotten which one. Like we had gone to the same high school. Or been sisters in another life. None of which was true. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - This unsettling and unpredictable nature of Florence, and/or of her work, reminds us of a kidnapping staged by Jung and Sandino Scheidegger in 2014 on the occasion of an exhibition at 22ruemuller. Visitors to the exhibition were presented with a questionnaire that allowed the artist and curator to determine who were the most reckless of the bunch. Those designated as reckless were lured into a car and driven 450 kilometres outside of Paris, where they were abandoned on a farm that they later discovered belonged to the artist’s parents. (Editor’s note) ↩︎
- Something clicked. I realized I had experienced her work in the same way I was experiencing her as a person. Her practice, her scenarios, seemed to unfold within that same blur, between presence and absence, fiction and reality, between the sense of having witnessed something and the possibility of having only imagined it. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - Florence’s work seems to put linear time into crisis. As Antonia Scintilla wrote in the exhibition text for Jung’s exhibition at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in 2024-5, her works “are not confined to the traditional spatiotemporal limits of exhibitions.” The more I engaged with her work, the more time felt less sequential than circular—what had happened, what was happening, and what might still happen began to overlap. Arriving ten minutes early suddenly felt less certain. I could have been on time, or already late. The distinction became difficult to hold. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - It brings to mind another of her scenarios, Jung58, in which a new receptionist starts their first day at the art space desk every day. All are hired through a temporary staffing agency, which provides a different employee each time. The position remains, never the person. What persists is not continuity, but its simulation. (Author’s note)
↩︎ - Sometimes the smallest gestures, or the most ordinary elements, trigger thoughts that seem to have no direct relation to what one has just encountered and yet, they do. The connection isn’t always clear, and perhaps it doesn’t need to be. I was reminded of Jung108, a piece consisting of thinking of “the uninterrupted chain of events that, since things were given names, has led to our birth” each time a boarded window is seen. The link is not immediate, but if one stays with it, it begins to make a quiet, disarming sense, as if one were condemned to the improbable prevailing over the inevitable. (Author’s note)
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