This Place We Made

This project explores the condition of placelessness through portraits of around 50 people photographed over three years in Amsterdam, tracing a young, mostly non-Dutch community shaped by mobility, migration and temporary forms of belonging.

"Where do we go when we want to be left alone? Do we go there to sleep? Where and how do we create our own little kingdom? And with whom do we do this? What do we do when we are at home? We settle in concrete, and dwell amongst bricks, but what does it take to make them our homes?"
The Make yourself at home in Warsaw, 2015.

This project explores placelessness as a condition of contemporary life through a series of portraits made in Amsterdam over a little more than three years. During that time, I photographed around fifty people who were part of the community around me. Only a few of them were Dutch; most had come to the city from elsewhere, often moving between countries, languages, friendships, jobs and temporary homes.

The project started quite naturally, as a way of photographing the people and experiences around me. Over time, it became a way of thinking about a particular time, place and community, even if all of those things were temporary or constantly changing. The photographs look at a generation for whom moving, migrating and living between places has become increasingly normal, and for whom belonging is often built through relationships rather than through one fixed place.

I am interested in placelessness not simply as a lack of place, but as a different way of experiencing and making it. We live in a world shaped by movement, communication and networks, where people move between cities and countries more often, change homes more frequently, and build relationships across different cultures and geographies. In this context, belonging becomes less tied to permanence and more to the relationships, objects, memories and communities we create around us. Through tools of the mind and matter we make, for better or worse, our home in the world.

I think this changes older ideas of place-making, where identity and community were more closely tied to locality and continuity. Instead, different histories, cultures and experiences overlap, sometimes only for a short period of time. A place can be shaped by people who may not stay there, but whose presence, relationships and experiences still become part of what that place is.

Portraiture became a way for me to think about these ideas through the people actually living them. Photographing someone is also a way of really meeting them. The camera gives me a reason to spend time with people I am interested in, to get closer to them, and to enter their lives for a moment. Many of the people in the project are artists, designers, musicians and others whose presence helped shape the social and cultural life around me, even if their own relationship with Amsterdam was temporary.

At the centre of the project are questions of time, place and community: what gives a place meaning when many of the people who shape it may eventually leave? What remains of communities that are always changing? And who gets to shape the record that is left behind?

By bringing these portraits together, I want to create an archive of this particular generation and moment. Not a definitive portrait of Amsterdam, but a record of one network of relationships that existed there at a certain time. The work looks at the social connections through which places gain meaning, while also thinking about how much control we have over the records we leave behind of ourselves, our friendships and our communities.