As I started to intensively work and travel between Asia and Europe in 2005, I constantly lost myself in what the urban anthropologist Marc Augè defined as non-places.

 

Marc Augé's definition of non-place refers to those anthropological spaces of transience that do not hold enough significance to be defined as "places" from an anthropological perspective. Spaces as airports, shopping malls, hotel rooms, motorways are the places where humans do not really meet each other and mainly remain anonymous. The concept of non-place is opposed to the notion of "anthropological place" - a meeting space for people that can empower their identities.

 

 I was deeply intrigued by the anonymity of contemporary society's ambiguous spaces. In big airports, I got willfully lost. I arrived much earlier than any of my flights to wander randomly, see and feel all those crowds passing me by, and, somehow, passing through me in this big alienating machine we humans have built for ourselves. 

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Therefore, I started photographing our “installations to accelerate the circulation of passengers and goods” and quickly widened my focus to gigantic commercial malls, fast-food chains, minority people amusement parks and all those artificial paradises and transit camps, where the unvoiced are timelessly parked away. 

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This project collects flashes of these sorceries humans built for themselves.  It was possibly shot in the hope to verbalize questions about tomorrow's pending socio-political queries.

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Non-Places was a finalist project at SIPA (Siena International Photo Awards) and was on display in Siena (Italy) on October-November 2016. It was published on Revista Pecado and Streetphoto Magazine