No Shoes to Choose 2023

This photographic project consists of fifteen collage sketches, completed in 2023.
It began with an open question: what is the shape of the place young people long for, and what do words such as safety, stability, and identity truly mean?

The idea slowly took over my imagination. Each time I walked through the city and found the places of my friends emptied—still carrying traces of them—I felt this strange transformation. The spaces seemed filled with an immense emptiness, as though belonging itself had vanished.

On one of my solitary walks to the sea, I encountered something uncanny: a great number of shoes, of every size and age, scattered with no owners. It struck me that they appeared more in this area than anywhere else. But why were the sizes so varied? Why gather in just one place? Whose steps had been left here, and what was their meaning?

In searching for these images, I turned toward the hearts of mothers, writing only a fragment of what they might feel in the moment of welcoming their absent ones back.