In 1869, Alphonse Daudet published Letters From My Windmill. Among the collection of short stories of the book, you can find L’Arlésienne (the woman from Arles), story that later became a theater play. All along the play, the Arlésienne is the main character of the plot, however, she never appears on stage.
Since then, in French, the saying « L’Arlésienne » is used to refer to a character with is crucial to a story, and who is mentioned repeatedly, but who never appears.
This image displays the patter of the « Arlésienne », with all the ambiguity between presence and absence. The background is made of short landscapes from Arles, and the center piece is a page from a book talking about adventure, escapes, and faraway places. The silhouette cut from the book page portrays a presence built from absence, an empty space that also gives substance to a story.