O, Quam Me Memorem?
After some tragic events in the past few years, I started to feel an urgent need to pause and reflect on what defines an individual human entity. I embarked on an intimate journey across unchartered endless seas of feelings, exploring regions of my self I have never ventured before. Unfortunately, instead of answering some troubling personal questions, this journey raised even more unsettling existential ones such as: what makes us who we are as individuals? As a species? Which of our feelings are purely personal and which are imposed by the “others”, who, in turn, are victims of constantly changing personal and external factors? Are we unconsciously acquiring new ways of being ourselves, with each technological breakthrough or world-view shifts? How can I go back to my “real”self?
This series of images tries to explore the elments that makes us what we are as an individal human being. The body does not tell all about us. What is hidden is bigger that what is visible. Our feelings are elusive, our self amorphous and our consciouness has no shape.
Since photography cannot capture the invisible, I have been experimenting with various ways of producing most these images using sometimes up 3 cameras (analogue and digital) to shoot a single picture. Similarly, I am trying to show these pictures using different supports simply because these are pictures that go beyond the visible and so should not be seen in the conventional ways of looking at photographies. I have for example, used a View-Master* to view some of these of images to give the impression that we look at them using the mind's eye. Another example could be, I created a fipbook** to convey the fading nature of memories**
The lack of clarity, the eroded textures as well as the dark themes of these images convey nebulous nature of whatever makes what we are.
* An intro video of how the ViewMaster is used to present 7 images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1F_z4D0Cmw
7 images to be viewed one spectator at a time. The experience is fully enagging the spectators's attention as both eyes can only look through the View-Master and so not distracted by any other visual stimilus
** A short video of the fip-book: https://youtube.com/shorts/vG-rUKauvvU?feature=share