topophilia
a poster series of journeys collected in a book or „the alienation of reality by photography and the distortion of memory“, May 2019
Inspiration for this project was the term "topophilia". I discovered it in the book of Alastair Bonnett „Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies"
„The renowned evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson talks about the innate and biologically necessary human love of living things as „biophilia“. He suggests that biophilia both connects us together as a species and bonds us to the rest of nature. I would argue that there is an unjustly ignored and equally important geographical equivalent, „topophilia“, or the love of place.
(…) the need to escape. This urge is more widespread today than at any point in the past: since fantastic vacation destinations and lifestyles are constantly dangled before us, it`s no surprise so many feel dissatisfied with their daily routine. The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is minutely known and surveilled, has given the dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret, or at least have the power to surprise us.“
For this project, I believe it is significant to write a more detailed description to value it.
Photography of places. You know you`ve been there, but it feels strange. Close my eyes, I feel how I felt, but can not always see what I saw. I can not always remember. One can only relive these moments absorbed in thought, wedged in the frame of memory. So far away, soaked in nostalgia. Sometimes it all swirls up to a motley mass and I ask myself, did I experience this? Beholding these glimpses. One can never truly grasp a moment. A blink of an eye and it`s gone forever. Moments become memories and experiences, that shape one`s life. These photographic snapshots of travels, are like windows that let you immerse in elapsed moments.
Sometimes one can only remember moments, because of an existing picture, shot at a unique moment, through one`s lens. This is the window to the alienated world of travels through memory.
thank you.
