I found this door in England, in 2017. It is a small door on which someone has carved all over, with a sharp point, capital letters, single or in groups, many of them overlapping, and none of them appearing to form words. There are also scratches, perforations and violent tears. This side of the door was painted with black enamel paint. On the other side, where the wood appears to be untreated, the words ‘John Tanner 1892’ are written in pencil in an antiquated handwriting. In addition to the mystery presented by each side of the door, there is another: the vertical gap, with rounded edges, smooth from careful sanding. This gap belongs to the board that overlaps and hides another gap of a partially missing board.

John was the most common male name given in the United Kingdom in 1892. Tanner, one of many occupational surnames, meaning someone who tans hides, was, according to my research, the surname of some 5,000 men that year. Could one of these men have written his own name on this door? The practice of writing in pencil directly on walls and furniture by bricklayers, painters, carpenters and other labourers is very old in the United Kingdom, but it is associated with notes and work plans, not with ownership. Could it have been written by someone other than this John and not in 1892 but later? Or even earlier?

In 2017, embedded in a wall of the Musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, in Luxembourg, this door was the protagonist of an installation of a two-channel video projection lasting two hours and forty-two minutes, which could only be seen through its gap. It's title was Door. It showed a carpenter making a chair in real time.

This door is now presented in two frames, one with itself, the other with a photographed version of its other side, in its exact dimensions. There is nothing less natural for a door than its horizontal position. Besides beds and tables, chairs and doors are the objects that most suggest the body to me. A horizontal door does not bring to mind the upright body that opens and closes it, enters and exits it, but the reclining body, asleep, dead, or at rest. The practice of art is a continuous celebration of artifice, and throwing a door up in the air, as clowns do to hats and plates, is an exhilarating moment of control: it doesn't fall, it hovers.