First Garden

Cemeteries are gardens.

Cemeteries are memory matrices: structured fields of absence and presence.

Light shifts through the cypress trees, plants and animals reclaim the paths, and faces carved in marble, amused, watch the living go by.

This series, shot in the First Cemetery of Athens and at the archaeological site of Eleusis – a place of rites and subterranean thresholds – continues my exploration of the Pleasure Garden and the Ghost City as imagined spaces superimposed on the world we inhabit. I conceive them as dynamic, overlapping topographies that preserve and transmit information in the form of sensual and spectral imprints.

In the “First Garden”, the two states of being blur together: movement and stillness, the cultivated and the forsaken, the anticipated mourning and the unexpected wild playfulness inherent in exploration.

The last garden becomes the first, and within its finality, something quietly begins again.