Embracing solitude…
Catch-32
My 32nd loop around the sun didn’t go merely as planned. A lot of things changed. Somehow, the global pandemic didn’t make it even into the top three of those events. The top spot in this bizarre chart was dealing with the consequences of something I didn’t think would happen to me — being alone.
Early into the year 2020, I got caught up in a vicious circle of mutually conflicting life events, conclusion-less discussions, and attempts to fix the long-lasting relationship. While spinning, the rest of the world is covered by a soft, see-through curtain. Only faint blobs of color pass through. Nothing with crips borders would ever come up. Nothing that one could hold firmly to get pull out of this spin-cycle.
I decided to make such an object for myself. Something with crips borders. Something that makes a sound of wind deflecting its many surfaces. Something that has a smell. An artifact that hands can hold onto and pull oneself out. A book.
The obvious challenge of making a book about the relationship (or its end) is the risk of being overly romantic and corny. This became a nice puzzle to solve and learn how to play with the photobook format. I was curious to explore how far one can push subtext through images alone without giving away a seemingly banal theme. How to communicate feelings, rather than the content, with photos.
In the end, I decided not to focus on the fading relationship at all. I also didn’t want to make it about us because there was no us when making those photographs. There was only me exploring my mind, feelings, and by virtue — backstreets of Kanto and Tbilisi. The book ended up being far more selfish than initially intended —
Catch-32 is series of pages that try to communicate what I felt that year through visual stimuli and cues — presented as a sequence of seemingly unrelated photos.
