ABOUT THE SERIES
Archives of a Dream
This collection very nearly never came to life…
Created over several years, these photographs were never meant to form a collection.
They belonged to different projects, experiments and moments in time. Eventually, I even grew distant from them. Some no longer appealed to me, others simply felt disconnected from the direction my work was taking. I put them aside, and for years, they remained almost forgotten.
Until one day, I came across them again.
Something had changed. Looking at them with fresh eyes, I began to see something I hadn't noticed before. They seemed to carry a certain evocative power, as though they had quietly acquired a life of their own. Almost as if, after all these years, they had something to tell me…
These pictures were created during the strange stillness of the Covid pandemic, when tourism had come to a standstill and I found myself stranded on Bali island.
As an artist, I saw it as an opportunity to project my own imagination onto a landscape emptied of visitors. To bring humans back into the underwater world, but in my own way.
I would jump from one project to another, chasing one wild idea after the next.
And I loved watching my muses drift underwater, finding their place among marine life, sometimes in the most unexpected ways.
Sometimes they seemed like ordinary visitors.
Just like Alice stepping Through The Looking-Glass, they looked amazed to discover the existence of a surreal parallel world, where they could fly alongside fish and dance with Manta rays.
At other times, they seemed like they belonged here since the dawn of times.
Haunting depths… Bewitching sailors… Silent guardians of a mysterious underwater realm.
The underwater world has always felt to me like a dreamlike interlude in reality.
Much like a dream lasts for a single night,
a visit to the underwater world only lasts for a single breath.
Just long enough to catch a glimpse and feel the magic.
Perhaps this is why I feel compelled to bring something back :
an image, a piece of evidence.
After rediscovering these photographs, and spending more time looking at them, I began to sense a common thread running through. Something that went beyond their original subjects or the circumstances in which they had been taken.
It suddenly struck me : time had turned them into archives.
Not simply records of past photoshoots, but traces of a shift into an imaginary world, where reality and fantasy had become intertwined. They seemed to bear witness to a place that might have existed somewhere, sometime… yet perhaps never did.
I wanted to bring this feeling further into the images themselves, so I began reworking them, drawing on the visual language of antique photographs and archival documents, as if they were fragments recovered from a mysterious past.
Gradually, these scattered photographs began to take shape as a collection.
And so, Archives of a Dream was born.
From the water to your walls
Selected photographs from this underwater collection
are available as fine art prints.