A Home With No Roof

Initiated in 2023 as my Bachelor of Photography diploma, this project draws from my personal history to examine domestic dysfunction. Through juxtapositions of scale and texture, it interrogates the home I grew up in.

A Home With No Roof explores the dysfunction within my home. This intimate space, meant to be safe and restorative, became the stage for painful scenes. These events left lasting marks, as if etched into the walls, doors, furniture, and carpets of the apartment where I still live, having never moved away.

Over time, I began to accept this reality, even personifying the apartment as a kind of monster. Once the home of a happy family, it has become the confining refuge of traumatized individuals. Uncomfortable and threatening, the scars of the past persist within its walls. In this series of photographs, I revisit those memories. Some feel vague, others almost surreal. Most remain embedded in the unchanged decor of the apartment.

The space feels overcrowded; that is why I aspired to build a new one, so I could stop suffocating and feeling so small. I become a figure constructing a new home—paradoxical in nature—as it blends my childhood ideals, fragmented memories, and adult wounds. The 1:12 scale models of the apartment allow me to control my environment, to assert authority over it. Yet, objects are too small, and I feel too large, clumsy, unable to handle them. My desire for control transforms into frustration and discomfort: through processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, fragments of bodies erupt into everyday scenes; objects appear bodily or poorly finished; everything is either overly stylized or precariously balanced. I position myself as both subject and object within this space.

These different levels of confusion evoke dysfunction and are essential to the series. From a distance, the scenes appear welcoming, but upon closer inspection, the details reveal hostility and repulsion. This paradox lies at the core of dysfunctional homes: a place where strangeness intertwines with the familiarity of the ordinary. When viewed closely—too close—the everyday becomes dehumanizing and repulsive, especially when the home itself is hostile.

We no longer know which reality the photographs depict: the idealized vision of a little girl, the world of a dollhouse, or the distant, unsettling reality of a wounded adult. Through this series, I reclaim my wounded body and draw upon new strength to become a healthy, balanced adult. The meticulous reconstruction of my apartment at a 1:12 scale becomes a cathartic gesture, inviting me to reexamine my memories, confront my childhood hopes, and finally lay them to rest.

The project was exhibited as a solo show in a former apartment space. This step allowed me to extend the series and fully merge the exhibition site with the decor of my own apartment. Site-specific installations became photographs, and these new works, together with the initial series, were published as my first monographic book under the same title in November 2025. (see full exhibition views on my website )