Utopia

Utopia explores the relationship between photography, place, and time through the notion of the non-place. The word utopia derives from the Greek ou (not) and topos (place), literally meaning “no-place”—a place that does not exist.

The project applies this idea to photography itself. Every photograph extracts a particular place and moment from time's continuity. What once existed in front of the camera becomes an image and remains visible, even though the original constellation of place, light, and time can never recur in the same way. Photography thus produces a paradoxical space: it preserves evidence of something that has already ceased to exist.

The project centers on a post-industrial colonnade photographed repeatedly over several years. Its columns, architectural fragments, and surrounding landscape are recorded through analog photographic processes, repetition, panoramic views, and circular crops. Rather than constructing a systematic document of the site, these images fragment and reconstruct it, gradually separating the photographed place from its physical counterpart.

Utopia therefore considers the photograph as a form of non-place—suspended between presence and absence, reality and its representation. Photography preserves a fragment of the world while simultaneously removing it from the time and space in which it originally existed. In this sense, photography becomes a form of utopia: a place that can be seen, remembered, and revisited, but can never be physically entered again.