Unlike Flowers

The project originates from the childhood question displayed directly on the wall within the exhibition: after the death of my mother when I was two years old, I asked my father whether she would return in spring, like the flowers in our garden. This naive question, tender and sorrowful, became at the same time the conceptual and emotional foundation of the work. Combining family archives, vernacular imagery, botanical references, and newly produced photographs, Unlike Flowers explores the capacity of images to act as mnemonic devices and relational surfaces across time – even more poignant when the memory of the beloved one is absent. Central to the project is a process of pilgrimage and re-enactment: revisiting locations my mother once visited through Europe, using her very same Voigtländer Vitoret camera, I position myself within the space she inhabited: sometimes replicating her pose, sometimes cohabitating with her. Through layering, superimposition, and analog processes, the images exist in a suspended state between past and present, and neither of them at the same time. The work interrogates whether places can retain traces of those who have passed through them, and whether photography can serve not only as a document, but as a catalyst for an encounter. In this sense, Unlike Flowers operates an attempt to a relation, an ongoing construction of shared memory where none was lived. At its core, the project proposes image-making as an act of love: a gesture that does not resolve loss, but insists on the reconstruction of memory and connection. Unlike Flowers is also a photobook published by Artphilein Editions in 2026.