Artist’s Statement — The Robin Project
I’ve always been drawn to artists and directors who find beauty in simple things — in minimal environments, in subtracting rather than adding, in moments where there’s less noise and clutter.
Artists like Terrence Malick and Andrey Tarkovsky, whose films look impeccable in form and symmetry and feel like long meditations, the early Yorgos Lanthimos with his weird new wave, uncomfortable cinema. Artists like Riko Kawauchi and Wolfgang Tilmans, who find their subjects in the everyday — a glass of water, a feather, a fragment of skin. I am clearly a believer that you don’t need to show much to say a lot.This is The Robin Project.
I didn’t plan this series. Last week, I found the small robin lying on the ground in my garden. It looked peaceful, untouched — as if it had simply paused between breaths. I picked it up gently and placed it somewhere safe and obviously I will never know why I did this nor if I should have done it. For a while, I just watched it and It wasn’t about sadness. It was about stillness, about how timid everything becomes when it stops moving. What was disturbing is that it looked so alive, so colourful, so beautiful and yet it was soulless already.That moment stayed with me. I started thinking about how we see death — not as something violent, but as something natural. I decided to make a few photographs around this bird, not to shock anyone, but to create a small, quiet ceremony for it. I wanted to give it a space where it could still exist, where people could look and feel something honest — something between loss and peace.Before I began photographing, I added some magnolia and pine seed pods I had kept from my travels — one from Lyon, one from Bergamo, and one from Lovech. I had collected them simply because of their form and texture, but I’ve always seen them as more than decorative objects. I saw them as symbols of regeneration and quiet resilience. Seeds are what remains after the bloom, and they promise continuity and life after decay.I shot five photographs to set a stage in how we understand endings and their circular notion: first as solitude, then as transformation and finally as reflection. The little robin that I accidentally stumbled to, became a symbol not of passage — of the moment when life turns into memory, and memory into eternity. This project is small personal project. It’s about looking closely, about paying attention. The robin and the seed pods are placed in a circular frame to underline the cyclical way we live. The photo of the robin on a human portrait is even more intimate and haunting. Here the seeds are replaced by a human. A start reminder that we are also in a way seed pods. We come, we see, we go.
