Time had to be a relevant factor. Middle Point Between My House & China is a collection of impressions, personal experiences and different visual perspectives of one remote place. It takes time to make a collection of this kind. I have experienced myself imagining China as a child, visiting China for the first time when I was sixteen, living in the country when I was twenty-one, re-thinking of myself in the country maybe yesterday.
I started this project as a teenager and finished as a young adult. I work at a very different scale now and think relatively different than I used to. My work remains the same in the basics, while I explore new subjects. I am very determined about the things that interest me and inspire me, but I still look at things with the same curiosity and surprise I did as a child.
I have been more and less focused at it at times, but I would not call it a side-project. I have worked on it as much as my many projects have allowed me to do so.
They are indeed in most of the cases anonymous, common people. The project is partially about the idea of isolation in a different culture. For the in situ portraits, I would spend days and days just walking by myself asking people I found interesting if I could take their picture by just pointing at my camera. I had a Polaroid camera with me too, and would take and give a Polaroid picture to every sitter who let me take their photo with my 35mm. For the studio portraits, which work as a recreation of what I experienced while being in China, I casted kids from my school. Central Saint Martins has a big community of Chinese students.
This project is a combination of both. As I was saying, there are two groups of portraits, the ones I took in China and the ones I took in the studio in London. For the portraits taken in China, I did not plan anything and the images are about the spontaneous. For the ones in studio, I recreated what I experienced while being in China, I imagined and designed to the very last detail how every image would look before I took them. I wanted to document my own idealized vision of China and be very specific about this. One of the main goals was to create a juxtaposition of images representing a more strict reality and images representing how reality is thought of and idealized.
There is not a right nor wrong way to read it. I just want to give as many clues as possibles to how it felt being there, looking at those people and places, experiencing my story.
As a child I used to think of China as the most remote place in the world. I also thought that if I dug deep down enough in my house’s back garden I would reach China at the other side of my tunnel. When I realized I could never reach China by digging the earth, I decided to establish myself in the Middle Point Between My House & China. 'China' represented the desire of running away, my goals; while 'House' was my present reality.
In relation to the project, I want to have a solo show and a book. The images that you can see at Fresh Faced + Wild Eyed 2015 are ten, out of about a hundred images that make the totality of the book/collection. And to China, yes, I will like to see how it goes ‘down my garden’. But this project is finished and I am focused now on the next one.









