Surface Condition
The series (work in progress) explores the relationship between body and landscape through the alteration of the photographic image. Through accidents, overexposure, deterioration, and manipulation of the medium, photography gradually loses its documentary function and becomes unstable matter. Body and landscape no longer occupy distinct spaces: they interpenetrate, overlap, and transform one another. Error does not act as an accident to be corrected, but as a tool for revealing other forms of perception and memory.
Test 1: Leo
Matter-body, matter-forest 3
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
In this first chapter I explored the tension of naked skin as a fragile surface exposed to its environment. The body appears without protection, but nudity is not treated as vulnerability alone. It is also a state of freedom, a way of stepping outside the social tensions that shape the body in everyday life.
The photographs were made with a Brazilian migrant living in France. The forest has an important place in his life: it is a space where he can withdraw from the pressures of the outside world and from the tensions linked to migration, meditate, and reconnect with himself. In the images, the naked body enters that environment not as something separate from it, but as something gradually absorbed, sheltered and transformed by it.
Matter-body, matter-forest 2
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
Matter-body, matter-forest 4
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
The sea is also central to his personal history. After exposure, some of the film rolls were immersed in seawater, allowing that element to act physically on the negatives. The resulting veils, marks, losses of information and shifts in density extend into the photographic material the relationship already present between the body and its surroundings.
Through these transformations, the boundaries between skin, landscape and photographic surface become unstable. The body sometimes remains visible and at other moments partially disappears, as if the territory were entering the image and reshaping it from within.
The project moves between exposure and protection, freedom and fragility, presence and disappearance. The environment does not simply surround the body. It becomes a place of refuge, affects the photographic material, and eventually becomes part of the body’s image itself.
Matter-body, matter-forest 4
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
Test 2: Without a subject
Matter-body, matter-beach
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
The House
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2015
Top of a Building
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
Matter-body, matter-beach 2
Analogue photograph
Physically modified film
2026
