Once Within a Room is an installation that is neither completely narrative nor primarily formal. It is at once the synopsis, the set, the characters, and the props of a story – a spatial configuration dominated by the phantoms of particular pasts. It presents the classic trope of lover, beloved, and the space between them. An installation in which the traces of two characters are staged but not made explicit. Not knowing – or almost not knowing – where the characters in the story come from, where they are going, turns them into symbols. Their isolation from the remainder of the narrative operates as a kind of egalitarian leveling: we are unaware of whether they are secondary figures or pivotal to the text from which they are taken. We learn as much about them as we do about the setting within which they are presented, that, moreover, resembles a stage set with its props, lights, and bits of scenery. Some works within this configuration might be looked at as strategies of forgetting, others as indexes of the past-ness of the past. Souvenirs. Remains. What is to be remembered, that is, what is still standing between what was and what is no more. But also the ways in which we choose to, or can, remember the past. The theatricality of language and the relationships bound and created through it. How is meaning felt? The general performative dimension of the installation derives from quotation, which attributes the elements of a story to fleeting remarks, at the same time enigmatic and familiar (already-known): a quality we could perhaps describe as that of emotional ready-mades