My roots. Double. Separated by two Balkan countries. With a distance of circa 902 km between them. Connected by cultural and historical similitudes, and other elements you might call ‘coincidences’ – but one never knows. A small town and a capital city. Silence versus overpopulation. A trip by plane and by bus. Different languages. Different expectations. Similar births, feelings of love, pain, hatred, forgiveness, similar deaths. But my aim is neither to talk about the differences, nor about what they have in common. I am trying to create visual associations of these two spaces – my mother’s hometown (Bucharest, Romania) and my father’s hometown (Pogradec, Albania) – in order to say something about myself – and firstly, to myself.
A sense of poetry, a need for escape, a worship of childhood, a contemplation of time, a rhythm.
At times I think that photography is worth practicing because of the unexpected connections you may find between pictures you’ve shot, years after you have pressed the shutter button. It is the way elements of photographs you have intuitively taken turn out to be spiritually related to each other that often makes me give a conscious explanation of my passion for this art. The mystery that connects images after a while.
Space is considered to be an important part of someone’s biography and evolution. There is always a point on the map where it all begins. And then the rest of the map becomes less important. Where my origins are – this is a fact. Facts are hardly the root of artistic creation. It is exploration and not information that can lead you somewhere. This is where I got now: my roots touched each other on a visual level.
Bucharest, August 2019
