Bardo / Black-and-White Dreams

There are states that can be called neither life nor catastrophe.
They exist in between.

Between the news bulletin and the walk to the shop. Between anxiety and habit. Between fear and spring light on the wall of a prefabricated apartment block.

***

Since February 2022, the space around us has become a space of prolonged transition. The world has not collapsed entirely, yet it has not remained the same. It is within this interval that Bardo emerges. Its black-and-white part is a chronicle of inner twilight: the state of a person who continues living among high-rises, trees, commuter trains, courtyards and vacant lots while somewhere far away, almost beyond sight, death goes on.

These photographs resemble traces of a consciousness passing through a long dream rather than documents. Here, the event itself disappears; only its echo remains. Blurred figures, dark shelterbelts, windows, corridors, snow, underpasses, people who have lost their density. The world looks as though memory has already begun erasing it but has not yet finished.

In this series, black and white becomes a state of mind rather than an aesthetic. Colour has left the world not because it is absent, but because consciousness can no longer hold the fullness of reality. A person enters a mode of inner preservation. They continue walking the streets, drinking coffee, riding the metro and looking at their phone, yet another geography already exists within them: a geography of anxious anticipation.

This is not the bardo of death, but of the end’s prolonged failure to arrive. A state in which catastrophe is always present yet never fully manifests beside you. It exists through distance, screens, rumours, other people’s photographs and messages. And this is precisely what makes it almost mystical. Invisible. Permeating everything.

These images seem to attempt to record the consciousness of someone living within a historical fog. What matters here is not the events but the drift between them. Not facts, but the sense of time slowly dissolving.

Bardo / Black-and-White Dreams is a series about life in an era of deferred impact. About a person who wakes each morning inside an intermediate state and no longer remembers where the dream ends and reality begins.