Thresholds

These four cyanotype photomontages engage directly with the ARCHIPELAGO theme — each image constructed as an island of meaning, isolated yet beckoning connection across the gaps between them. The series uses layered photomontage to enact Cacciari's core p

Series title: Thresholds

Project Description

This series of four photomontages began as a personal reflection project. The images explore identity, memory, and the way we situate ourselves within place, narrative, and time. The photographic source material was shot personally over years of travel, capturing landscapes, architecture, and moments of quiet observation across multiple countries and continents. Each composition layers these travel photographs with archival material. Maps, engravings, botanical prints, typeset pages examine how the self is constructed from accumulated fragments rather than a single coherent whole.

The work connects naturally to the ARCHIPELAGO theme. Cacciari's framing of crisis as a generative condition, and the archipelago as a model for coexistence across difference resonates with the series' central concern. Meaning emerges not from isolated elements but from the space between them. The images themselves are products of crossing geographically, culturally, and temporally.

Technique

Each image was built as a digital montage from original travel photography combined with archival source material, composited and toned in a consistent Prussian blue palette.

The composites were output as large-format transparencies and contact-printed using the cyanotype process. The initial prints lacked sufficient tonal depth and detail in the shadow areas. To address this, the dried prints were scanned at high resolution and the original digital montage was overlaid and blended with the scanned cyanotype. This combined the organic texture of the analog print with the tonal range of the digital layer. The result is a hybrid image that exists across both processes, with neither fully dominant.

At a time of hardening borders, rising nationalism, and increasing cultural isolation, work that insists on connection across geography, history, and process feels necessary. These images are a small argument for permeability.