Inhabited Fragments

Inhabited Fragments is a sequence within The Substance Playground: distance not as absence, but as the trace a presence leaves — in bodies, in objects, in the spaces that keep their shape.

Inhabited Fragments is a sequence of seven photographs — part of the ongoing project The Substance Playground — which follows a solitary figure, at times doubled, through a series of thresholds between the domestic interior and the sea. Created using generative artificial intelligence within a deliberately analogue visual language — film grain, muted colours, square format — the work explores distance as an inner, spatial and perceptual condition, returning, frame by frame, to a single question: "Is distance something from which we have moved away, or a space that has always been there?"

Artificial intelligence has enabled me to superimpose different layers of interpretation, starting from a single image. By adding or removing elements, the narrative has become a constantly evolving process, both in terms of the scenarios depicted and the format of the medium in which they are presented. The work aims to foster a dialogue between photography, digital art, installation and publishing, and to engage the audience in a reflection on loss, a sense of belonging and the enduring nature of places.

The sequence explores this question through a single thread: distance measured both by oneself and by the surrounding environment; isolation staged within inhabited and abandoned landscapes; bodies captured in motion or appearing simply still. Within Substance Playground— where the landscape has already crossed every domestic threshold — this project shifts towards depicting what remains once that distancing has taken place: not absence, but survival — a fragment, a part of oneself, a memory or a figure — a ghost of the environment and of what has been left behind. The process does not aim to depict recognisable places, but to create environments capable of evoking the sensation of being faced with something familiar which, nevertheless, can no longer be fully experienced or understood.

Each image isolates a figure — sometimes doubled, though they never quite meet — within settings that refuse to keep the sea at bay: a chair placed directly at the water’s edge, a bath positioned to frame the very waves it seems to contain, a storm breaking through the glass into a room where two women sit without looking at one another. Every object and every surface serves as a vehicle for meaning, a means through which distance takes shape and becomes visible. A single pink garment, stained and faded, recurs in the interiors and on the shores, in stillness and in what appears to be mere movement — the body as the sole fixed point from which distance is continually measured, and the only place where it becomes visible. Perhaps the two interpretations are one and the same, viewed from two different moments.

The fragment, the memory, the ghost are not remnants of something we once possessed and have lost: they are the form that distance takes when it needs a body to become visible — an echo, a residue, a trace of a presence that is no longer directly accessible, but which has never entirely gone away. Not proof that we were ever close — merely the way, looking back now, in which we measure that space.

The sequence concludes with the image: a woman standing before an element representing the sea, in a suburban garden. The wave is an image — transported, altered, to which one returns.