Women wandering around ruins

Woman wandering around ruins is a photographic series that approaches places marked by traumatic memories and their scars as “ruins,” exploring how life after an event can be experienced and reconstructed through the body and the senses.

Here, ruins are not simply abandoned places or remnants of past events. Underground spaces, tunnels, caves, fortresses, military facilities, alleys, corridors, tombs, greenhouses, bathtubs, and other abandoned spaces appear as “in-between zones” where the past and present intersect, and where bodies move through or remain, evoking memories. The ruins are at once places that preserve traces of events that have passed and places that continue to change and take shape in the present.

I return to the ruins of my own body. “Returning” contains only the past, but what is being carved there belongs to the present. The people who arrive, the rain and snow that fall, what is excavated, rebuilt, burned, and restored—all of this belongs to the future. So I am not going back; I am going. It is a place I have visited countless times, where I was sexually assaulted, where I whispered words of love, and where I slept after leaving home.
— Excerpt from Notes for Woman wandering around ruins

The artist repeatedly returns to places where events occurred and to their surroundings, photographing her own body, women around her, and scenes from everyday life. Using both medium- and small-format film cameras, she photographs places and bodies from different distances and perspectives. Vivid and direct images intersect with uncertain and fragmented ones throughout the series. Rather than directly depicting or reconstructing past events, the photographs revisit the sensations and traces that remain in places and bodies after an event, viewing them from the present.

The “woman” in the title does not refer to a single, fixed identity. The artist’s own body and the bodies of women in the photographs, belonging to different times and circumstances, overlap within the same spaces. They are women who have visited these places and spent time there. Through them, personal memories and experiences inscribed on women’s bodies emerge not simply as records of particular events, but as forms of memory that are repeatedly shaped between bodies and spaces.

These spaces hold two opposing sensations at once: the downward pull of depression and the ruins, and the possibility of new stories emerging and rising from within them. The work follows the tension between these sensations, capturing moments when events that cannot be fully articulated in language return as bodily sensations and memories of place. The ruins are therefore not simply traces of events that have ended, but spaces where the past and present, scars and renewal, disappearance and regeneration continually intersect.