The last days of Pompeii

Having poured my heart into each of my previous series, I seem to have a few grams of it left to give to this one…

The Last Days of Pompeii is a reflection on a future without me. A time when I will no longer be here, when I will no longer be able to hold a camera in my hands and take a few more photographs. This is where the idea of creating photographs on paper that seems to have survived four decades came from. The project exists at the intersection of illustration and photography, where the gazes of ancient figures meet the thoughts of a contemporary mind.

I kept this project close to my chest for almost a year. Throughout the summer, I studied the processes of restoring old paper and immersed myself in the archives of ancient frescoes. Some have survived centuries and made their way into the present, yet they can no longer be moved without risking damage. Once, in places such as Pompeii, people created these frescoes with their own hands, imbuing them with historical meaning and that invisible grandeur that art is capable of leaving behind.

I wanted to evoke the feeling that humanity is still living at the foot of a giant Mount Vesuvius, just as the people of Pompeii once did. We continue to go about our daily lives, fall in love, and make plans while a catastrophe gathers somewhere nearby. Only now, it seems, the volcano is already erupting. And its name is artificial intelligence.

The information surrounding us has become so viscous that it has begun to exhaust us. It changes incessantly, blurs the boundaries of our perception, and distorts reality to unimaginable extremes. I am deeply tired of it. I feel afraid for my own future, for the monumental changes taking place in our psychology, our ways of thinking, and the very philosophy of life. Everything is unfolding at such an alarming speed that I increasingly find myself feeling utterly powerless in the face of what is happening.

These reflections are what led me to turn towards the past - towards materials that age, deteriorate, absorb time, and preserve the traces of human hands. I wanted to create something that could serve as evidence of my existence, my vision of the world, and the thoughts I hope to leave behind. Something resembling archival illustrations discovered among the ruins of a civilization that was once convinced of its own future.

All the photographs were created through collage, without any intervention from artificial intelligence. They emerge as archival illustrations, relics of an imagined future looking back at our present.