A Hollow Garden

"A Hollow Garden" explores the possibility of a digital garden as a digital shelter as we navigate through intertwined physical and virtual existences. How can we exist and relate to one another and how does our physical body experience this transition?

I started creating images for the series “A Hollow Garden” during the pandemic. At that time I was reunited with my long-time partner just before the lockdown began. As the world halted we found refuge in the forests around the house, wandering around the blooming spring nature. We were constantly together, isolated from everyone else. Back at home, there were the screens. All our social life, entertainment and work were in this parallel universe. In an era when everything was forcibly migrating to the digital world, by making use of a lidar sensor I started documenting my everyday surroundings in nature and home, myself and him. Unconsciously I found myself revisiting traditional genres of painting like still lives with flowers or fruits, landscapes and portraiture. During that time of uncertainty, I was wondering if there was a way to bridge those two opposite situations I found myself in, nature and the digital sphere. I was longing for a “safe space” by creating something that felt to me like a personal digital garden of Eden. A man, a woman, a garden, a beginning.

3D scans, photogrammetry and depth maps capture distance, only what is in proximity can be captured while the horizon is always absent. The aesthetic of the produced footage is fragmented and prone to error. Gaps, holes, dark spots, missing parts, lost pixels. I was wondering what else is lost during the process of translation of organic forms into geometric ones, the conversion of physical objects into their “digital twins”.

Soon after, in the summer of 2021, the forest around my area was burnt. Wildfires burnt to ashes a record number of 1.301.239 hectares in Greece, in a year when wildfire seasons were larger than in previous history worldwide due to climate change.