_project: black swan

(2024 - 2025)

During a period of heartbreak and loneliness I began a daily pilgrimage to the swans by the canal close to my home in Berlin. I’ve returned to the same spot regularly for over a year, always photographing the same swans. With time, I started using “wrong” settings and embraced technical failure such as overexposure, motion blur, and noise as an aesthetic of disappearance.

I’ve collected thousands of images by now. They remind me of musical notes, or brushstrokes, or couples mid fighting, or dancing lovers. 

The title is a nod to Malevich’s Black Square, but while his abstraction was rooted in pure geometry, this is grounded in the natural world. It’s not about rejecting nature, but reducing it, holding back just enough information so something else can come through.

Sitting somewhere between presence and absence, between control and accident, the series attempts to explore the interplay between what’s real, what’s felt, and what’s imagined.