Repeat Without Return, 2026
This series is constructed as a sequence of images that are perceived as the same place, although each was taken at a different point along an urban route. The photographs document different staircases along an embankment, but the repetition of angle, distance and composition creates the impression that the viewer is encountering the same fragment of space again and again. What emerges is an experience of repetition without coincidence.
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The staircase traditionally connotes transition, movement, the possibility of changing level or state. In this series it retains the form of a promise but loses the function of a completed passage. Each frame reads as an attempted step that leads to no exit. Space does not open — it closes in.
The repetition here is neither decorative nor typological. It operates as a mechanism of cognitive entrapment: the viewer is certain of having seen this place before but cannot prove the match. Memory begins to substitute for fact. Distinct points of the city accumulate into the experience of a single step that cannot be completed.
The series was made during a temporary disruption of the habitual spatial order. Access to these viewpoints was possible only for a brief period — when the surface of the water became a solid ground and allowed a position that is ordinarily inaccessible. This temporary transformation of the environment does not become the subject of the work, but it determines its logic: transition exists only as a brief possibility that then disappears.
There is no digital intervention, artificial distortion or visual glitch effect. The disruption arises within perception itself. Different places look the same. Space simulates familiarity. The route promises progress but each time returns to the starting point.