EVERMORE

There are places built to be larger than the here and now. Churches, chapels, monasteries and synagogues where people hoped and prayed and sang and mourned across centuries. They were never meant for one generation but for everyone still to come. EVERMORE visits them after the congregations have gone.

Their vaults still carry an echo, even without voices. You walk in and lower your voice without thinking, although there is nobody left to disturb. The arches, the ornament, the light falling at a slant through high windows onto weathered stone: all of it holds something that did not leave with the pews and the lamps. These spaces were built for eternity, and somewhere inside them that claim can still be felt.

Whatever the denomination and whatever the century, they give off a grandeur that moves even those who believe in nothing. Perhaps because they are the one thing people have ever built that served no practical end. They are hope turned into space, and hope does not age along with the plaster.

Decay changes these places differently from others. It takes the liturgy away and gives back the silence that stands at the beginning of any act of devotion. An abandoned house of worship is emptier than any other building, and in that emptiness there is more room for whatever it was once about.

Abandoned they are, gone they are not. EVERMORE is about that perishable permanence: about spaces whose silence lays bare what they were always for, and about a dignity that no decay can reach.