Distopia, a new book by David Nissen, will be launched on February 27th. He sent us this text of introduction.
Distopia is a visual wandering through a world emptied of its human pulse, a suspended world where the human is nothing more than a shadow or an absence. The streets are empty, light sculpts the silence, and architecture becomes memory.
Distopia offers a poetic and sometimes unsettling meditation on the built environment when no one is watching. Light takes on the role of a character, architecture becomes a memory, and the city is the silent witness to another form of existence. In this visual journey, time seems frozen or reversed. The images do not document the world as it is, but rather as it could become in a reality detached from our own. They raise questions about presence, absence, permanence, and the traces we leave behind.
Distopia invites the viewer to venture into a narrative space where the familiar becomes strange, where beauty is born from silence, geometry, and shadow.
Distopia tells no story. And that is precisely where it speaks. Through emptiness, reflections, lost angles. It speaks of solitude, trace, and cold beauty. It speaks of us, but without showing us.
Distopia does not depict a flamboyant science-fiction future, but a shifted present, a reality close yet stripped of its human rhythm. The viewer faces the solitude of forms, the purity of light, and the ghostly presence of humans, suggested only by a shadow or a trace. It is a city without an obvious narrative. No crowd, no gaze, no scene. Just structure. Emptiness. Light. And perhaps a breath…
David Nissen : Distopia
19x25cm
43 pages, Japanese softcover rizo binding.
An edition of 250 numbered and signed books, including 20 collector’s editions with three 18×24 prints, two rizo prints, and one barita print.
Book design and printing by Sergej Vutuc.
