Formed by the repeated appearance of the same three things in a subtly different relation to each other, its position within the exhibition - may serve as an invitation to follow the associative logic that binds Marcelle's work together. Já visto, however, could also be a tribute to the experience from which it takes its title, namely that of being convinced you have already been in this exact same situation while also knowing that you have not. This usually safe and fleeting escape from habitual perception has proved deliciously evasive to powers of explanation.

Scientists have found sophisticated ways to induce déjà vu but can offer no satisfactory cause for why it occurs.

While testifying to our potential to be simultaneously convinced and doubtful of what is real and exemplifying all that evades explanation, the experience of déjà vu has also held an irresistible pull for philosophers. For Henri Bergson, who called it 'false recognition', déjà vu is the upsurge of a usually suppressed remembering of the present intertwined within every instance of perception.

The falseness of this recognition of present as past, however, makes our experience of it no less vivid. What is false, in this sense, gains force from proximity to truth.

Isobel Whitelegg