A Home With No Roof

This project is my Bachelor of Photography diploma project. It debuted in 2023, and is an ongoing exploration rooted in my challenging personal history. It examines the dysfunctionality within the home and how it shaped my experience a a young girl.

A Home With No Roof explores dysfunctionality within my home. This intimate space, meant to be safe and restorative, became the stage of painful scenes in my life. These events left lasting marks, as if etched into the walls, doors, furniture, and carpets of the apartment where I still live, never having 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 is now the confining refuge of two traumatized individuals. Uncomfortable and threatening, the scars of the past coexist with my mother and me.
In the series of photographs, I revisit those memories. Some feel vague, others almost surreal. Most are embedded in the unchanged decor of the apartment. The space feels overcrowded, sometimes giving the impression that the four of us still live here.

That’s why I aspired to build a new space, so we could stop suffocating and feeling so small. The series embodies this idea of renewal. I become a figure constructing a new home—one that is paradoxical, as it blends my childhood ideal, my fragmented memories, and my adult wounds. This confusion is also reflected in the notion of scale, evoking dysfunctionality. I thought the 1:15 scale models would allow me to control my environment, to have power over it. Yet, they are too small, and I feel too large, clumsy, unable to handle them. My desire for control turns into frustration and discomfort. This paradox is the series’ central theme. The interplay of opposing concepts is fundamental to A Home with No Roof.

From a distance, the scenes appear welcoming, but upon closer inspection, the details reveal hostility and repulsion. The project portrays the home as a place where strangeness intertwines with the familiarity of the ordinary. Too close—really too close—the everyday becomes dehumanizing, repulsive, especially when the home is a hostile space. Fragments of bodies erupt into everyday scenes, objects appear poorly finished, everything is either overly stylized or precariously balanced.

The element of surprise, intrigue, and immersion in these scenes is essential to the series. Objects become bodies, and my body becomes an object. We no longer know which reality we are in: the idealized vision of a little girl, a dollhouse, or the distant and strange reality of a wounded adult. Through this series, I reclaim my wounded body and draw on new strengths to become a healthy, balanced adult. The meticulous reconstruction of my apartment at a 1:15 scale is a cathartic step, inviting me to reexamine my memories, confront my childhood hopes, and finally lay them to rest.

The project was exhibited in a small room I built within my school, carefully designed to emphasize the ideas of scale and evoke a sense of domesticity. The intimate space, with its light carpet and golden curtains, reinforced the exploration of home as a theatrical stage, offering viewers a tangible connection to the themes of the series. (see full exhibition views on my website )