The Refrigerator Keeps the Only Light Nobody Chose

In Turin this autumn, a photographer's pictures are living inside a refrigerator set into a shop window, and the only way to see them is to do the one thing you do every day without noticing: open the door. A show kept inside a refrigerator sounds like a trick until you remember how rarely you actually look at the appliance you open more than any door in the house.

Every light in my flat I chose on purpose. A paper shade low over the table, a lamp with a cord I like the colour of, the bare bulb in the genkan I have never swapped because it suits the concrete there. The refrigerator light is the one exception. It arrived with the machine, cold and faintly blue, indifferent to hour, and it switches on at two in the morning for nobody in particular, usually just me, after the milk.

Tokyo taught me to treat a refrigerator as furniture before I thought of it as a machine. Mine is narrower than any I grew up with and taller than seems reasonable, wedged into a gap the kitchen gave it and nothing more, the way a good bookshelf fits a stair landing rather than a wall built for it. The door shelves hold what a hand reaches for without reading a label — the soy sauce, the good mustard, a jar someone's mother made that I am rationing. The drawer at the bottom holds what I am still pretending I will cook this week.

Open enough refrigerators and you are reading a household rather than a kitchen. Mine admits things I would not say aloud: half a lemon going soft in its skin, last night's rice under a plate because a 48 square metre flat with one good chair does not keep more lids than bowls, an egg carton with exactly one egg, which is somehow always the state I find it in, never zero and never twelve.

The photographer in Turin chose his refrigerator because nobody expects a gallery behind a compressor hum. I think he is onto something larger than a stunt. The one arrangement in my flat that never changes, through every rearrangement of the room around it, is that cold blue light falling for a few seconds on a single egg, waiting in its carton, the only thing awake in the kitchen at midnight.