“André Malraux, selecting photographs for Le Musée Imaginaire”: This image arrives in Farrah’s inbox, accompanied by Virginie’s observation that “Editing is looking; editing is time.” Virginie suggests, “What if you had the time to look at the work that I sent you? Time to edit. Your own time.”

Virginie is in London for much of the time allotted for Rose Peebles conversations; Farrah is in Los Angeles, Cambodia, and New Hampshire.

The two speak only once on the phone, at an appointed time, and the phone conversation matches the tone of the emails: a kind of romantic disconnect, Virginie’s promise of prints, Farrah’s promise to deal physically with those prints.

“I will print all different parts of different images so that you can’t see anything. All parts of the images will be under-exposed or in shadow. Plastically, you will receive twenty image extracts, each of which at first glance will appear quite dark. By looking at them for some time, you will start to recognize details of architecture and people. You will never get the whole picture.”

The capacity to edit is in this case like a gift from one artist to another: Virginie’s prints become Farrah’s content; the space becomes Farrah’s form. Time is a currency here, and editing becomes what it perhaps always is: a performance without an audience.