The festival that never was

I am holding an object. It is tinted blue and shaped like a small book. On the cover, a young man holds both hands up to the sky as in a celestial salute. The image is a still from Kevin Jerome Everson’s 2017 film IFO. The object is the catalogue for the 2020 edition of the Courtisane Festival, where a retrospective of Everson’s work ought to have taken place in April 2020. I say ‘ought to’ because the Courtisane Festival ‐ like so many other events in 2020 ‐ was cancelled. The surviving catalogue is a strange object, both a record of something that was and was not.