THE CASTLE
An 86 years old lady, 50 years of life at the same address in London as told by its interiors.
THE FUTURE BELONGS
TO GHOSTS
Ghosts in Reverse: Those digital future citizens that manifest themselves in architectural renderings of the social life of future cities, surrogate figures with anticipatory agency, prefiguring the city yet-to-exist as if it already existed, and occupying its future ahead of its time. These aspirational immaterial characters are actors in the narration of place making as place marketing, whose scripts are written as 'future present', offered as inevitable projection of a present spatial order.
WHEN ROCKS SPEAK
I see granite boulders defying gravity, levitating weightlessly in the midst of the scorching heat as inorganic statements of geological cognition asking to be heard. The loudest declaration of living they can make is to leave the imprints they have made on the land, vacate the spaces they occupied for centuries, drawing a hollow place that speaks of presence by their absence.
‘Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds,
and restores them to matter in the forms of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom’
Henri Bergson, Memory and Matter.
'I will wait for you,
Until everything is still.
Until a stone
And burst into flowers'
Eugenio De Andrade
LIFE ON MARS
I spent August 2025 in the Gardunia region in Portugal, living off grid as a housekeeper on land owned by dear friends between Alpedrinha and Povoa de Atalaia. During that period wildfires broke here and in many other locations in Portugal, due to dry conditions, excessive heat, dry lightning, strong wind gusts, and arson, ignited to clear the way for the extensive monoculture of cherries or for solar power farms.
For days, these magical traditional landscapes became otherworldly, anxious and eerie, made more so by the dramatic knowledge that the thick smoke filling the air and blocking the sun, was the airborne evidence of destruction of natural landscapes and human resources.
In solidarity to all the local people who I shared those days with, in between disbelief, sadness and manifesting joy.
THE ETERNAL CITY
Between March and May 2024 I live in Rome, as a working guest of dear friends in Torpignattara. From there, in the mornings, I departed in all possible direction to forage for visual things that would speak of this Rome we still call 'eternal city', only to find that again and again I was just lost, evading through the frame the impossibility of a real connection.
'Rome is still falling'
Robert Smithson, 1961
IN AND OUT AND
IN AND OUT OF TIME
As we step in and out of now-times and embrace emergent times, we enter new narratives of our own making, clinging onto our hopes and learnings in dark times. Like remote tremors on a land of auspicious but uncertain gifts, we struggle to embody what we wish for and know to be true. What do we need to experience to believe that the struggle is worth the efforts? How can we linger in those experiences long enough to lay the foundations of another world-making?
TOTTENHAM SPACE AGENCY
'There was an expectation for great things to happen, and the greatest one was about to happen, like an anticipation that manifests things not-yet, there in our imagination. The launch of the first apartments was imminent. The future was already here, and I could see it every day and night, right from my window. It was the last thing I saw when I went to bed, and the first thing when I woke up in the morning and pulled the curtains. It was the event that was already happening, dreaming in my wide awake dreams'
A Regeneration Story in the making, 2022
'There was a moon. The rocket was white and big in the junk yard. It held the whiteness of the moon and the blueness of the stars. Bodoni looked at it and loved all of it. He wanted to pet it and lie against it, pressing it with his cheek, telling it all the secret wants of his heart'
Ray Bradbury, The Rocket, 1950
THE HALE CODEX 2021
When neighbourhoods are swallowed into regeneration atmospheres, things begin to speak in tongues, an urban visual glossolalia that nobody knows in its entirety, though we perceive it as a pervasive murmur coming from within. Pictures only capture the mid-sentence point in time, a ghost copy of the real thing which has already disappeared.
LA FILANTO
FILANTO, founded by Antonio Filograna in Casarano, Puglia, in the late 1940s, grew from a small workshop into a massive footwear giant, peaking with 3,500 employees and producing 12 million pairs annually for brands like Nine West and Timberland. It was a cornerstone of Puglia's economy before closing between 2011-2013 due to the increased competition from low-wage countries and the impact of globalization.
In 2018 and then again in 2023, I entered the abandoned factory in ruin.
MARTYRS
Take two seemingly disconnected but equally pervasive visual experiences. The first is the persistent imagery of Hezbollah or Amal martyrs present in so many areas of Beirut and some parts of Lebanon. This is a highly codified visual communication with strict formal conventions: the subject is central, emphasised by the blurred and burnout background that singles out the departed in their heroic status. The second is the impact of car culture in Beirut, which has shaped and continues to shape its urban development. On top of that, the long gap in vehicle import caused by the civil war (1975-1990) means that cars acquire the status of veterans in automobile terms, stretching their use and lifespan to their limits. Patched up, sacrificed beyond resistance, then abandoned to their rusting destiny.
These are the MARTYRS here.
BEIRUT BONJUREN
In 2010, Lebanon experienced a tense period characterised by political instability and fears of renewed conflict with Israel. The year was marked by a fragile security situation as the country grappled with its recent history of violence and political divisions.
That might have been the political climate, but in late summer 2010, I went to Lebanon with my family, Ella aged 7, during the hottest Ramadan.
We fell in love with its big hearted people and the unrestrained beauty of its land across history. We learnt that some people can endure monstrous injustice and pain but they will never give in and never give up their right to be joyful. With gratitude to Tania and her family, we took us into her home and motherland, to show us the truth.
WAITING FOR NOSTALGIA
WAITING FOR NOSTALGIA sets out an impossible and paradoxical encounter between an object and a landscape.
Shot in Al Faya Desert, Sharjah, UEA
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