Familiar

Familiar investigates the formation of selfhood within familial and communal structures, exploring how identity is shaped through relationships with others. The work traces natural patterns, seeking a shared logic of inheritance, becoming, and separation.

In 2024 I moved into my grandmother's house. The apartment had been empty for many years, and my memories of it were fragmented, tied almost exclusively to my childhood.

Returning to such an intimate yet foreign place prompted reflections on how identity is shaped—both within and beyond the contexts in which we grow up—continuously renegotiating what we recognise as our own.

These observations led to a visual research fuelled by the discovery, within the house, of family portrait prints and negatives. From this material emerged a layered narrative in which manually cut archival photographs interweave with images of domestic spaces, landscapes, and blossoms. The series is haunted and held together by an underlying question: is the familiar bound to remain so?

The sea squill, a plant that grows in clusters along Mediterranean coasts, accompanies the narrative, drawing a parallel between human behaviour and the surrounding natural world. Its cyclical blooming evokes a relational organism in flux—rooted in repetition and resemblance, yet distinct in each manifestation.

An elusive, unsettling familiarity lingers in the background, while ethereal, near-spectral presences drift against the rocky terrain and the rigidity of inherited bonds. The subjects withdraw from the collective structures they once served, leaving behind only silhouettes. Absence becomes both form and possibility.

Familiar explores what it means to exist as an individual in relation to the other and to a shared reality — locating the sense of belonging in a process of constant, irreducible redefinition.