The Horizon of Metamorphoses: Oetopos
Having explored the impermanence of space, I continue my investigation into emptiness and the threshold through a new series, Oetopos, in which the landscape becomes the site of a slow reclamation. My intention is no longer to document reality, but to reconstruct it. Oetopos is a place that does not exist: a visual utopia born from the assemblage of photographic fragments gathered within an abandoned quarry. In this theatre of stone and water, the gaze becomes the architect of a landscape in perpetual transformation.
Rendered in high-contrast black and white, the photographs unfold as diptychs and polyptychs, composing a scenography of wandering. Monochrome functions as a principle of transformation, stripping the world down to its essentials: a vibration of greys, a tension between presence and absence, fullness and void. Dry grass becomes punctuation upon an invisible manuscript, while the mineral structures provide the silence in which this writing can emerge.
My photographic practice is a search for the edge—for the threshold, that fragile line where two materials, two temporalities, or two states of the world converge. By exploring the border, the fracture, the interval, I seek to reveal this Oetopos: a nameless place, a silent score where the line becomes writing and space itself is reduced to its most elemental sign. Here, the image is no longer a window onto the world, but the trace of a territory that exists only through the encounter of light and shadow.
The series is built upon a succession of confrontations. The stillness of flooded basins, mirrors of a suspended world, enters into dialogue with the memory of wildfire. Charred trunks, stark and graphic silhouettes, stand against the quiet resilience of young shoots slowly reclaiming the ground. Between darkness and light, between the mass of stone and the openness of space, it is always the threshold that draws my attention—that place where metamorphosis becomes perceptible. Oetopos is the refuge of this recovered fiction, an architecture of landscape in which the photographic assemblage opens a space for the imagination.
Through this reconstruction emerges the possibility of a landscape capable of imagining its own future. The scar borne by the earth is no longer merely the memory of loss; it becomes the condition for renewal. Oetopos offers no promise. Instead, it invites a way of seeing in which humanity may once again find its rightful place, attuned to the long rhythm of the living world.
Footnote
¹ Oetopos is a neologism coined by the artist from classical roots. Combining œ, evoking origin, with the Greek topos (“place”), it designates a place that does not exist prior to the act of seeing. Neither a real space nor a utopia, Oetopos is a territory of perception, born through photographic assemblage, where light, memory, and landscape are recomposed into a possible reality.
