RIFT

My project is about the rift within individuals and society. We, children raised on stories of stability, are confronted with a world where every day brings a new crack. It's anxiety, an endless stream of notifications, red icons that offer no answers.

Verb: to tear, to break, to fracture. Noun: the trace of destruction; a gap opened by impact, pressure, or collapse. Figurative: internal discord, a breach in wholeness—within a mind, a community, or the shared picture of reality.

In childhood, the world felt friendly and safe. The future unrolled like a roll of wallpaper: a linear story where every event followed logically from the last, life flowed evenly and justly, and tomorrow was certain to be better than today.

All the events of recent years—pandemic, escalating ecological crises, wars—wiped away that illusion. The dense fabric of reality cracked, and through the fresh rift I saw chaos: shapeless phenomena that stripped away any hope for order and peace. This is rift—a rupture in what I once believed to be solid and enduring.

The civilization humanity built so meticulously proved fragile. Instead of the promised technological paradise where wars, diseases, and drudgery were relics of the past, we awoke in a tangled, red-lit, dangerous labyrinth. No guarantees, no certainty. Only anxiety and something growing on the edge of the breach: an inversion, an element that has no place in our world.

We are all graduates of the institute of violence: the pandemic taught us to live in isolation, wars trained us for constant dread of the worst, and climate catastrophes instilled the sense that the planet itself is rejecting us.

My project is about the quiet rupture inside individuals and society when the future collapses. It is intergenerational disillusionment: children raised on tales of stability now face a world where every day brings a new crack. It is digital-age anxiety—an endless stream of notifications, red badges, algorithms that amplify panic but offer no answers, and above all, no hope.

The red hue is not merely a technical device. It is a metaphor for anxiety (red as an alarm signal), blood (real and metaphorical), and erased promises of progress (red flags, red lines, red corrections in history textbooks).

My RIFT is a dream on the edge of consciousness—when you are not yet asleep but already seeing between two worlds; it is internal bleeding: outwardly everything holds, but inside there is chaos and destruction. The photographs capture this threshold: moments frozen in red light, artifacts of a world that can no longer be saved.

Technical note All images shot on special Duna RedScale 135 film. No digital manipulation; only lab development. Any distortions are accidental—traces of the film’s own fragility and external influence.