Atlantis

I am lost in the remnants of my vanishing continent. A lost utopian continent—that is how Plato described Atlantis, which sank into the depths of the sea. Mine, too, is seductive in its beauty but also unsettling and misleading. It is a “no-place” of no definite time and space, the post-apocalyptic, devastated world created by humanity “full of avarice and unrighteous power” (Plato, Critias). It is a world of silence that no one hears, devoid of human life but containing and remembering the vestiges it left behind.

The book comprises two series of works. One is of digital photographs taken from 2016 to 2019 in places where I thought there was a chance to find clues of the vanished mythical world. At first, the series evokes traditional landscape photography, but from one work to the next, that notion is subtly subverted. The private mythology merges with the primeval.

The second series was created in 2020–21 from the hundreds of images that were abandoned while working on the first series. During the COVID-19 pandemic, alone in my house, I delved into my archive of “rejected” photos and they invited me to play with them. Through various computer editing techniques, I selected elements from photographs, and turned them into continuous action. There is a moment in this play when something is created. I disassembled photographed nature and reassembled it as an illusory and imaginary space created out of destruction, free of the shackles of reality, wrapped in a beauty that disguises its preordained or lurking fate.