(2013-15)

The Lost Land started as a documentary project on the last inhabitants of two valleys in southern Macedonia. It quickly became something different: I tried to draw a photographic essence of these valleys and their timeless quality. Structurally The Lost Land follows the idea of thesis (humans) antithesis (nature) and synthesis (human faces in nature).

The first year I took images of the last remaining inhabitants of the valleys. I applied a very old school portrait aesthetics and the printed the images in one of the oldest photographic processes (VanDyke). The second year I produced photograms of plants using cyanotypes as a base and washed them in the river. I thought this was the closest representation I could get of the land there. The third year I created a synthesis of the land and man dichotomy, photographing faces in rocks. I was looking for faces of people I met in the first year. The exhibition shows these images next to each other, implying an underlying metaphysical structure.

Installation views taken in Bildraum1, 1010Wien.