Nowhere Near

Nowhere Near

2018 - 2019

The only border that exists in the blue one that covers us all.

I tried to put myself into shoes of a person at the end of a long and exhausting journey to an unknown place, the place he imagined himself as a beautiful castle of clouds that puffed away upon reaching it.

What remains when the dream disappears? Where could one search for answers? Where would he look to find the signs to come back home?

I grew up in a country where black migration doesn’t exist. NowhereNear has come out as a result of curiosity and my inner struggle against prejudices. I tried to tell a story of someone who decides to leave his land and pursue his dream physically moving from one place to another, overcoming barriers, struggling to reach his own Eldorado. As I discovered, the dream one is following is not always only a desire for future, sometimes it is a nightmare that appears when the dream doesn’t get fulfilled and remains a recurring vision of something that can never be reached.

Surely not all the migrant stories suit this project, it is a sort of an imaginary seeing, an attempt to see the world through their eyes trying to explore migration as a personal matter and not as a mass movement.

Alisa Martynova

Alisa Martynova born in 1994, originally from Orenburg, Russia. After finishing her studies in Foreign Philology in her home country, in 2019 she graduates from a professional photography three year program at Fondazione Studio Marangoni in Florence, Italy. She currently works as a freelance photographer and as an assistant for a photography collective Riverboom. In 2018 she is presenting her work at Leica Story, in 2019 she becomes the winner of the photography category of Premio Combat Prize and the second place winner of Premio Canon Giovani Fotografi, later she projects her work at the opening night of Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Currently lives and works in Florence, Italy.