SEELAND
2025 - ongoing
Seeland is a broad body of work which extends my ongoing investigation into image-making and its relation to recurring themes in my research: the intersection between human presence and the built and natural environment, the dynamics of landscape alteration and reconstruction, along with questions of cultural identity, memory, and the tensions between personal experience of place and the action of time. This project is also a way to understand how thought, influenced by repetition and at times a surrender to chance, can evolve and find its articulation through visual form.
Following the notion of unheimliche heimat, the aim is to examine homeland as both a familiar and unsettling entity. It’s particularly interesting to observe how certain characteristics or conditions of a place, especially when encountered in foreign lands, can simultaneously evoke a sense of belonging and a critical distance, leading perhaps to a more complex understanding of spatial identity and of the artist/traveller’s condition, whose disorientations do not lead to new discoveries but rather to a series of uncanny intertextual returns.
This body of work, named after a collection of prose by Robert Walser, evokes the Swiss Lakeland while remaining universal in its ambiguity. As of this moment, none of the photographs in the series were taken in the Seeland, and perhaps none will necessarily be.
‘Where I was astonished, perhaps I was in turn the object of astonishment; and if my surroundings appeared to me uncertain and ambiguous, the same was the impression I made on them. Well, if anything, it was a possibility. The countryside and all its beauties had eyes, and I was happy about it’.
Project supported by the Centre de la Photographie Genève as part of the 2025 Mentorship Program, with Massao Mascaro.