Photographer statement: Last year, I moved to a new community located in a very remote suburb, which blends in with the surrounding rural areas, forming a unique landscape. In recent years, China has built many high-rise buildings, but due to the impact of the epidemic and economic downturn, the development of many areas has stagnated, and new houses often only serve the purpose of living, becoming "sleeping cities". Our community is the same. There are no public places, so people have nowhere to go. In the evening, everyone comes to the only riverside for a walk. People can do whatever they want here. They exercise, walk their dogs, set off fireworks, have picnics, and sometimes burn paper for the deceased (a Chinese custom). This place has become our public space. Several villages are next to our community, and it is very dark at night. The riverside looks like a stage from a distance because of the streetlights and the people are like actors in a drama. The scene looks beautiful under the streetlights. Because it is far from the city center and lacks rules, this place is full of possibilities. People's thoughts and consciousness are extremely relaxed here. Therefore, it accommodates all kinds of people and needs. It has become a sample of the interaction between urban and rural areas, people and the environment. It is like a utopia.

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Photographer statement: DD/MM/YYYY is a series of personal photographic explorations of place and presence. It explores time and what remains of it as it flows between us. In a way, it is an isolation in a small universe that I am trying to create and within which I am trying to exist comfortably. What I discover (or find) in this series are human forms and traces of nature, bombarded by fragments of memory that I collect to create this new passage, which may be a new isolation or a way out. At the same time, I am attempting to remain consciously present, aware, always in the way that every new answer leads to a new question, starting a new circle while ending the previous one. As I look back on this project’s moments of creation, I observe that there is always something more to unfold: a reminder of what is actually important without seeming important; a fleeting glimpse of the everyday, magical, yet trivial events that life provides.

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Photographer statement: In this personal documentary, I have been photographing my wife’s family of origin, who live in a provincial town in Northern Greece. Although a family therapist myself, I have often found it difficult to fully engage with the familial terrain. Not surprisingly, then, this project presented me with a great challenge but also opened up an avenue to self-reflexivity. For me, the camera served as a distance regulator and a reflexive tool; it allowed me to approach this family as a ‘participant observer’, providing me with a position from which to observe myself observing others, while simultaneously searching for a home. These pictures then intend to create a version of family life, but also speak of my desire to understand and connect with a world that is not my own, yet one that I feel in many ways deeply attached to.

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Photographer statement: With the rise of mobile devices, the infrastructural needs of the telecommunication industry have exploded, and since the 1980s, cell towers have started to fill the planet. The scenery changed dramatically in 1992 when a cell tower in the US was transformed into an artificial pine tree for the first time. Since then, this kind of camouflage has evolved into a global phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and nature. The images from the series focus on the camouflaged communication and surveillance infrastructures that have become part of the California landscape and are photographed exclusively at night. The series depicts these artifacts of the digital age as, in Amy Clarke’s words, a “societal preference for ‘fake’ aesthetics over ‘ugly’ reality”.

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Photographer statement: Kingdom. is a series of 6/7 analog color photographs. I started shooting my immediate surroundings during Covid lockdown and went on my first road trip holiday in my own country that first summer. Norway is a monarchy, which to me is a state of illusion. I have always felt kings and queens to be a fairytale concept, alongside wizards and dragons. And in many ways, this concept of being norwegian, of what we agree "Norway" to be, is an imaginary concept. So I have taken this to heart and attempted to photograph what my norwegianness looks like to me. Some of this is nostalgia - having grown up in a small town I tend to gravitate towards items and architecture that is reminiscent of my childhood. Some of it appeared to my camera on my travels and begged to be photographed. In sum I hope this to be a documentation of a nation that does not exist, which I hope resonates with both my fellow norwegians but equally to people everywhere that walk around with imaginary nations in their own minds.

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Photographer statement: They are fully inserted in any urban context, planted in the ground. Most of us don't even notice their presence, those tall metal constructions that illuminate at night but remain awake during the day, watching over the whole territory — I see this as a rare case where aesthetics exceeds the utility.

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Photographer statement: I live in the southern suburbs of Athens, Greece. Inhabited continuously since the ancient times, this is a place characterized by material abundance and laid-back, luxurious lifestyle. At the same time, high fences, barbed wires and surveillance cameras turn the houses into strongholds or border barricades and the streets into some kind of urban “no-man’s land”. This setting poses questions about the role of my own domestic comfort zone and whether protection and restriction are actually the two sides of the exact same coin. By documenting the paradoxical elements that surround my everyday life, I try to make sense of myself and address my own existential questions, however it still remains vague and unanswered to me whether the outside world is paradoxical or I am the paradox within it. Seen together, these elements form heterotopias that are extracted from their surroundings, offer a new viewpoint and make a novel comment upon the existing references. Having the documentary genre as a starting point, the reality that I present is, therefore, a distilled one. The Voice of the Cicada is a visual testimony of my endeavor to interpret, transform and re-create the environment and the people that surround me, leading to an eventual understanding and definition my own self and my place into the world. My heroes, as alternate versions of myself, dwell in affluence, within their dazzling, colorful bubbles. Both watching and observing but also being watched, they look like fireflies in a sealed jar filled with sugar water.

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Photographer statement: In-Between is a photographic collaboration between artists and identical twin brothers Anthony and Phillip Reed. The pair maintained a continual exchanging of photographs while living apart in different continents. (Anthony was based mostly out of Shanghai and Phillip, between London and New York). Most of the images represent transient, urban spaces. “Spaces that seemed to also reflect the transience experienced during this chapter of our lives.”

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Photographer statement: When plant scientist Teemu Teeri went out of Helsinki Railway Station in May 2015, he noticed some vivid orange petunias in a planter. He was surprised since petunias don‘t come in orange colors naturally, and he took a few stems for testing in his lab. This chance encounter was the starting point of a case which was later called the 'petunia crisis‘ and ultimately led to the destruction of all orange petunia variants worldwide. The book‚ "The Petunia Carnage" is based on the true story of the orange petunias, following the consequences of Teemu Teeri‘s discovery, when DNA tests revealed that the orange petunias were transgenic. The book goes back to the origins of the orange petunias at a controversial 1990's landmark experiment at Max Planck Institute in Cologne, followed by their mysterious "escape from the lab". Finally, it explains why the orange petunias were regarded as "illegal" after they had been bred and sold without permit for more than 25 years, leading to their worldwide mass destruction in 2017. The story of the orange petunias is more than a scientific anecdote - it is rather a parable of what can happen when scientific interest, commercial marketing logic, socio-political values, public discourse and unexpected coincidences collide. "The Petunia Carnage" narrates the chronology of the case in a tongue-in-cheek way, consisting of photos, facsimiles and artifacts, adding fictional elements to scientific facts and archive material. The photographic narrative of the book is based on the cooperation with all relevant actors of the orange petunia case. They have shared their experiences, provided image material and also granted access to their labs, where they are still permitted to breed transgenic orange petunias for scientific research. The Petunia Carnage, Jan. 2022, self-published 108 pages, 90 images, 22x28cm, hardbound, first edition of 350 copies.

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Photographer statement: Dreaming Sunset is the story of an expectation. The waiting of the end of the eruption for the inhabitants of La Palma. Cumbre Vieja eruption lasted 88 days, the longest in a long time. Each evening the sunset paused time. People went up the hills to look at the volcano, waiting for the end of the nightmare.

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