I invited twelve of my best friends to a party. Three weeks before, I visited each of them at home and made a portrait while they imagined the party to come. On the night itself I made the second portrait. Three weeks later I visited them again, and photographed them while they remembered the party.

Each panel of the triptych overlays the twelve portraits of one moment: the anticipation, the night itself, the memory. From the light of those photographs I distilled a DNA strand that ties the three panels together.

The work grew from a single thought: that we are all one. That the lives of the people around us — now, in the past and in the future — run parallel to our own, and that one day we will share everything we ever lived through, beyond time and space. Here and now we catch no more than a glimpse of it, in our encounters with one another.

I read that researchers had found patterns resembling those of language in our so-called junk DNA — the part that does not code for proteins, some 98 per cent. What if that is where everything is stored? A shared memory, the all. Call it God, call it the universe.

There is no evidence. But there is imagination, and it brought me home.

Stretched out, the DNA in a single cell of your body is about two metres long. The DNA from all your cells together would reach twice as far as our solar system is wide. And in the heart of our own Milky Way, close to the black hole at its centre, astronomers found in 2006 a nebula eighty light years long in exactly that shape: two strands, twisted around each other.

The very largest and the very smallest share the same form.

I was about thirty when I began this triptych. I dived into philosophy, quantum theory, religious and spiritual literature, and I could not stop thinking about what it would mean for me and for everyone around me, if it were true. The work has become an image of that search for the meaning of life, which can be as beautiful as it is hard — a search that has never stopped.

Readers of Omaria will meet this thought again: in a world where time is layered like memories.

Interested in a print? There are no more than ten. Email xandra@dupper.nl.

More of my work is in the portfolio.