Sense of Place
What does a place feel like? How do we construct a sense of place? The sense of place is multifaceted – visual and carnal. The landscape is reflected on the retina, it smells, it feels on the skin. It consists of mental imagery, it contains fragments of history and today. It interweaves together the past and the present. The fragments of the place reveal about life but also remind us of its perishableness.
Italy, Basilicata, Matera – how to present a historical place that is repeated similar in thousands and thousands of pictures before me? What new can I add to that continuum? These are the questions I pondered over while working in an artist residency in Matera. People are absent in my images, but still strongly present in the traces they have left behind. The marks can be from fifteen minutes or fifty years back. Besides photographing these fragments I photographed the surrounding landscape through reflections. These create a new dimension to the landscape distancing it from the viewer, linking it with the inaccurate continuum of remembrance.