OTTO

when the rivers meet

My photographic project in Northern Evros, “When the Rivers Meet,” explores the landscape as a field of inscription of the Anthropocene, where the human imprint remains active even through its absence. The image functions as a carrier of memory, highlighting the relationship between space, time, and experience. The landscape is charged, and human presence is intense, yet rarely visible. Empty scenes, traces, and signs of wear form a peculiar visual language in which memory is not recorded as narrative, but as residue.

According to my artistic practice, this space is revealed as a field where social and political mechanisms are inscribed. Rules, systems of control, and modes of coexistence do not appear directly; instead, they diffuse into the landscape through material traces and silent trajectories. Evros, as a borderland, redefines the notion of public space, where different social realities intersect without necessarily meeting. Through this experience, the landscape is transformed into an archive—an archive that does not narrate, but rather suggests.

This imprint led me to perceive the image not as documentation, but as a tool of revelation—a process through which space can be re-signified through the relationships, absences, and displacements that constitute it.
My experience at the Evros border prompted me to create this work, driven by the question of how such a vast geographical area can exist on the verge of depopulation, appearing as an empty stage, while at the same time being filled with human traces left behind over time and through natural decay.
The photographs are shot on bulk cinematography film in order to precisely and deliberately render the sensory and aesthetic qualities of the images. The feeling of memory and oblivion allows absence to become an active element within the image, creating a tension between the visible and the invisible, reminiscent of a cinematic sequence or film strip.
The images are installed in a horizontal arrangement that unfolds as a continuous narrative across the wall, evoking a cinematic sequence or film strip.