Confessions (2025)

In September 2025, I invited friends and family members to record themselves reading a 20-second passage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782). I collected these clips, and edited them into two short films.

This was the passage from Rousseau:

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) is an account of the first fifty-three years of his life, up to 1765, describing his experiences from humble childhood in Geneva to international fame. It is full of factual errors: Rousseau breezily admitted that his memory often failed him, and that the dates are often muddled, and that he transposed lots of the events. But none of this really bothered him. His aim was not to write a correct history of what he’d done. His aim, Rousseau wrote, ‘is to communicate an exact knowledge of what I interiorly am … to enter into my own heart.’ The epigraph to Rousseau’s Confessions is the Latin ‘Intus et in cute’ – ‘inside and under the skin.’ The reader, Rousseau writes, ‘must follow me …into every recess of my life’. ‘I must be continually present to his gaze … he must not lose sight of me for a moment.’

The sentence I asked people to read captures Rousseau’s sense that he is unique: that no one else is like him. But a sense of singularity, of being apart, is an experience that everyone feels. Rousseau is both an individual set apart from what he calls the ‘numberless legion’; but he also speaks for everyone. ‘I at least claim originality’, Rousseau writes; but one of the early meanings of ‘original’ was something which serves as a model, or, something from which copies can be made: at the heart of originality is the potential for duplication, for the production of copies, of lots of things which all look original. Rousseau ends the passage by saying he was cast from a mould, which is fascinating: he is ‘made’, pressed out of ‘mould’, like a pot on a shelf, cast in a production line. But the mould is broken in the process, meaning we can’t make any more.

I asked people to read the text into an iPhone, or similar, and to send it to me. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do with it, but the idea of lots of people repeating the same claim to singularity seemed interesting. I asked each reader – in a gesture at the 18^th century – to wear a white cravat or fichu: this usually meant a white napkin, pillowcase, dish cloth, or even paper towel.

At first, I asked people close to me – the project was in part about documenting my community in the autumn of 2025 – but soon the invitation spread, people sent it on to other people (tutors to students, friends to relatives), and I began to receive 20-second film clips from individuals I’d never met, from the UK, and abroad: Ottowa, New York, Cardiff, Winnipeg, Washington State, rural Virginia, Madrid, Montreal, Paris, Los Angles.

It was so enjoyable, each day having 3 or 4 film clips pinging into my inbox, sometimes in different languages. I still wasn’t sure what would emerge, but the process of putting each clip into a series made me think about other art works I enjoyed that had a similar mix of repetition and difference. Like Christian Marclay’s 2010 work The Clock, a 24-hour collage of moments in films when the time is spoken or told, organised so that the time in the clip on screen matches the time of our watching. Or the 24-hour video to Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’, which loops one infectious 3-minute pop song across a whole day, each repetition showing a different person in a different place dancing to the same tune. Or Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself, made for the Venice Biennale in 2007, in which French artist Calle, after receiving a break-up email ending with the words ‘take care of yourself’, asked 107 women to respond to it: ‘To analyze it,’ in Calle’s words, ‘comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it.’

When happens, when a claim to singularity is repeated over and over? Is it undermined? Is it magically refreshed each time? Or is what we experience a shared sense of being unique?

One effect of the repetition is that as we watch the series of readings, we become hyper alert to differences between clips – we become close readers, attentive to shifts in accent, emphasis, a word missed out, the repressed laughter on a speaker’s face – and in that sense, individuality emerges in the gaps between each performance. As we watch, our attention starts to drift away from the spoken words and on to the person’s face, their clothes, their glasses, the dog in their lap, the book-shelves behind them, the glimpse of a city out the window, the tattoos on their arm, the buffeting wind, the cat stalking unseen beneath the speaker’s chair. If there’s a sense of individuality, here, maybe it’s less in Rousseau’s bold words about singularity, and more in the messy surround – the contingent stuff of a particular time and a place – that gets scooped up and recorded along the way.

The film exists in two states. At the top of this message is the shorter version, in 3 parts: part one, about 9 minutes, featuring a small sample of those clips, back-to-back; part two (about a minute), which re-edits elements of those speeches; and then part three (about three minutes), which is my favourite.

The full film of everyone who submitted a clip – that’s about 120 people – is on YouTube. You can view it here. It’s for the completionists.