Photopia

Photopia is a long-term artistic research project investigating post-industrial ruins as sites where presence and absence, utopia and dystopia intersect. The project began in 2016 with my discovery of an abandoned post-industrial colonnade, to which I returned repeatedly over the following years, photographing its gradual transformation and disappearance. These concrete phantoms function as temporal thresholds—fragments suspended between what a place once was, what it has become, and what it might still become.

The title combines photography with utopia—from the Greek ou (not) and topos (place)—and proposes the photographic image itself as a kind of non-place. Rather than documenting the architecture systematically, I use the site as a testing ground for different ways in which photography constructs, preserves, transforms, and ultimately replaces our experience of a place. As the physical site changes and gradually disappears, its photographic counterpart continues to expand.

The tension between utopia and dystopia is embedded in this transformation. The site belongs to a broader landscape of post-industrial ruins across the former Eastern Bloc, where architectures once associated with modernisation, collective progress, and imagined futures now persist as material remnants of radically altered political and social realities. These concrete phantoms carry a tension between collective hope and historical trauma, between the futures once projected onto them and the histories that subsequently unfolded. As ruins, they become temporal thresholds: tangible fragments of history that continue to occupy the present while inviting speculative reinterpretations of both past and future.

Photography enters this unstable territory as another form of preservation that can never be complete. Throughout the project, the same environment is translated through different photographic technologies and material conditions, including Polaroid and analogue photography, 8mm film, stereoscopic images, lenticular prints, and spatial objects. Each process produces a different relation to time, space, materiality, and perception. Photography therefore does not function as a neutral record of what was present, but as an apparatus that continuously reconstructs the place it attempts to preserve.

This process gradually shifts the project from documentation towards an archaeology of both place and photographic image. The disappearance of the site is accompanied by the instability of its representations: analogue materials age, instant photographs change, images are reproduced, enlarged, fragmented, spatialised, and transferred between different media. What initially appears to preserve the site simultaneously demonstrates the fragility of photographic preservation itself.

Photopia emerges from this paradox. Photography promises to save something from disappearance, yet it can do so only by removing it from the continuity of lived time and transforming it into an image. Both the ruin and the photograph become thresholds between presence and absence: the ruin carries the traces of a future that never fully materialised, while the photograph carries the trace of a present that has already disappeared.

Rather than understanding photography as a fixed trace of the past, Photopia considers it as a mutable space in which different temporalities coexist. The physical site may disappear, the materials carrying its images may deteriorate, and the technologies through which it is perceived may become obsolete, yet photography continues to produce new forms of presence from these processes of loss. Photopia is therefore not an attempt to reconstruct a vanished place, but to examine photography as a speculative space between utopia and dystopia, preservation and disappearance, memory and transformation.