Return to Paradise is a poetic and conceptual investigation into the fragile tension between humanity and the natural world in the age of the Anthropocene. This series emerges from a deep personal and aesthetic desire to reconnect with the environment—not as something external or exotic, but as a living, wounded entity to which we still belong. It reflects on the ecological crisis, the illusion of human centrality, and the spiritual and material dislocation that defines our current condition.
In this body of work, I stepped outside of my usual role as both subject and author of my images. I relinquished the self as protagonist, placing the landscape—and its uncanny, mythical, or threatened presence—at the center. It was both a formal and emotional challenge: to disappear behind the camera, to observe, to listen, and to resist the impulse of self-representation. What emerged is a visual space that hovers between beauty and collapse, stillness and entropy, presence and erasure. I explore environments marked by absence, tension, or transformation—spaces that oscillate between the real and the imagined. I am interested in how these images can operate as speculative thresholds, where the human and the more-than-human encounter each other without resolution. I approach the photographic act as a ritual of witnessing, not mastery; a way of surrendering to the unknown, of jumping into the void, of trusting that something will appear in the frame that speaks beyond what I can control or explain.
My process begins with a conceptual intuition, often linked to personal milestones—motherhood, aging, displacement—but evolves into broader reflections on life, death, memory, and the possibilities of renewal. In these photographs, I seek not to document, but to disturb: to evoke the sense that something is about to vanish, or be born. I am drawn to moments when the landscape seems to inhale, to fracture, or to hold its breath.
This series is also a response to the overwhelming complexity of the contemporary world. Classical science promised equilibrium, but what we now face is instability, collapse, and uncertainty. Return to Paradise asks: where do we stand within this symbiotic and unstable reality? What remains of paradise when the Earth itself is a site of trauma, both physical and symbolic? What kinds of narratives—and images—can we create from the ruins?
I am not offering answers, but thresholds. The images move between melancholy and resistance, silence and urgency. They ask us to inhabit uncertainty and to reflect on the possibility of a new, fragile intimacy with the world we have wounded. They are a form of visual meditation on time, loss, and the shimmering presence of the more-than-human, asking—always—what lies on the other side.
