This person doesn't exist speaks to us about a self-perception in transformation, about detachable and ephemeral entities that do not require a birth to exist, nor do they need to endure in memory. As a statement, it can signify that this person once existed, or that their existence was always an illusion.
In its operation, it lays bare a fiction of modern rationalism: that of a body as a vessel for a mysterious yet unequivocal substance (be it soul, mind, or psyche). A body devoid of signs and separated from its person, which, in the eyes of the machine, is a data dispenser. Meanwhile, its mind rehearses multiple and simulated personalities, which do not need to establish themselves and cohabit simultaneously.
In a speculative and insightful gesture, This person doesn't exist performs that experience. An unpredictable mutation of subjectivity that gains speed through digital channels. A process in which the intensive displaces the extensive, a pattern of reality that is improbable yet viable.
Merlina Rañi, 2022.
