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- Letters from l’appartement 49C: Solstice Reflections on Home, Change, and Stillness
Letters from l’appartement 49C: Solstice Reflections on Home, Change, and Stillness
Newsletter #6, June 2025 | A meditation on the summer solstice, shifting homes, and the quiet rituals that shape transition.
l’appartement 49C
June 22, 2025
Dear friends,
The solstice was this week—the longest day of the year. A stretch of light that feels generous, expansive, complete. In old calendars, it was called a time when the sun “stands still.” But even at its peak, the turning begins.
We’ve been thinking about that lately: how transitions often begin in moments that don’t look like change. A bright room. A steady routine. A space that still fits, but just slightly differently than it did before.
At l’appartement 49c, we’re not moving. We’re still here. But we’re inhabiting the space differently now—less visibly, more inwardly. In this season of transition, this letter becomes our way of continuing the conversation. A vessel for what continues to move even in stillness. A different room in the same home.
“Homes in transition” doesn’t always mean packed boxes or closed doors. Sometimes it means holding a room differently. Sometimes it means noticing what begins to shift before it actually does.
The summer solstice reminds us what it means to hold a moment at its edge, to let brightness linger before the slow turn begins again.
What parts of your own space are beginning to shift, even if only slightly?
🖼️ Artist Spotlight: Xingjian Ding
Xingjian Ding is a New York–based artist whose practice centers on the emotional texture of home—not as something fixed, but as something lived-in and layered, shaped by absence as much as presence. In Untitled, a 5 × 8-inch painting shown in our most recent exhibition, Fragments in Our Home, the surface was built slowly—one mark per day—each brushstroke opening the studio session like a ritual. The painting began as a way to return to making after a long pause. What emerges isn’t a scene, but an emotional map: assembled from dreams, memories, missed gestures. There’s no clear narrative—just the imprint of a routine, slightly altered. We thought of this work as the solstice approached. Like the season, it captures a moment at its peak—but not with stillness exactly. More with a sense of pause. Of holding something fleeting just long enough to feel its shape. |   Xingjian Ding, Untitled, 2024 |
🧺 Object Memory: Calendars as Domestic Archives
Poline Grishina, Wall, 2024.
Cotton paper pulp, mulberry paper, sheets with inkjet prints, 36 x 48 x 5 inches
Most homes have one: a calendar pinned quietly to a wall or propped near the kitchen phone. A tool for keeping time, yes—but also a slow archive of ordinary days.
Doctor’s appointments, birthdays, and lunches penciled in—notes about when someone was supposed to call. Days we meant to mark off but forgot.
Have you thought about how calendars don’t just track time—they trace intention? They hold what we planned, what changed, and what lingered. In stillness, they become a kind of diary. A record of where we thought we’d be—a mirror of time’s gentle shift.
Which of your objects—ordinary or overlooked—has quietly been keeping time for you?
📚Curator’s Bookshelf - Gaston Bachelard on The Poetics of Space
 | Bachelard invites us to reimagine domestic space not as static architecture, but as a container for memory, reverie, and becoming. For him, home is emotional—a vessel that shapes our interior lives as much as it shelters them. This month at apt49c, that vision feels especially close. As our programming turns inward, we’re thinking not only about space as structure, but space as sensation—how a room might hold our dreaming. |
✨ A Final Reflection and a Soft Nudge
We’ve also been thinking about how we inhabit space visually—especially after visiting Sargent and Paris at the Met, where gesture, clothing, and light became their own kind of architectural memory. Even portraits can be transitional spaces. A turned shoulder, a softened gaze, the way fabric holds shape after the body has moved—each one suggesting presence in motion.
It reminded us that home, too, isn’t always a place we stand in, but a posture we carry. A way of returning without staying still.
If this letter reminded you of a space you’re holding differently now, consider passing it along. Not as a newsletter, maybe, but as a gesture. A quiet reminder that even in the brightest moments, we’re allowed to begin again.
And if you’d like to stay connected as we continue to turn—find us over on Instagram: @apt49c.
Happy Summer Solstice 🌞
— Steffie, Olivia, and Tessa