project
in conversation
with spirits
2020 - present time
conversation with spirits is a long-term project in which photography functions more as a ritual than as a document. it grew out of a period in my life when people close to me began to pass away. some died suddenly, barely having had time to say goodbye. others i accompanied through a slow departure, staying with them until the very end. i was struck by how differently death can be felt. in one case it is almost bodily and tangible. in another it feels elusive and ghostlike.
confronted with this experience, i began to ask how people in different cultures encounter death and cope with the trauma of loss. i became interested in remembrance suppers in Christianity, shiva in Judaism, preparations for the bhāvacakra in Buddhism, and other rites of passage in which grief takes the form of action. these practices appeared to me less as belief systems and more as ways of enduring confusion, fear, and pain.
at the same time, i read anthropological texts by Mircea Eliade, Torchinov, and other researchers, thinking about ritual as a necessary human tool. for a contemporary person raised in a large city and not grounded in a single religious tradition, the question of how to grieve can be especially disorienting. familiar rituals do not always work, and new forms of collective mourning are almost absent.
in this project, photography becomes a way to respond to this gap through action. each image is made within a performative gesture. sometimes this gesture is consciously constructed by me. at other times it emerges on its own. what matters to me is that action itself is the root of ritual. in this sense, the photographs in the project do not record or illustrate a ritual. they exist as traces and continuations of lived actions, allowing grief to be experienced.
trust
this photograph explores a gaze that is closed to the world and open inward.
a moment of hesitation, when feeling comes before understanding, and the body prepares itself for what must be done.
this photograph comes from the first photoshoot of the project, and i see it as opening the conversation with spirits.
this photograph was taken in a very small church on Corfu, one of the smallest i have ever been in. it is tucked away from the main streets and clearly exists not for visitors, but for those who know exactly where they are going.
during the hour i spent inside, around fifty people came in and out. all of them were locals. some stopped briefly to cross themselves in front of an icon, others lit a candle and left almost immediately. there was no performance and no explanation. just a habitual gesture, woven into everyday life.
the space felt dense with presence,
in a way that made it difficult to leave.
a collective movement made up of many solitary moments.
in the altar area, candles were placed in water.
working with a film camera, it was important for me to hold onto this combination of a shared murmur and the complete privacy of a personal ritual, repeated again and again
as part of ordinary existence.
everyday gestures
suspension
this image emerges from an encounter with death.
a state in which the self feels partially dissolved, suspended between presence and absence.
ancient mythologies and personal superstitions resurface together, from the River Styx to small forbidden gestures, revealing how grief instinctively reaches for symbolic crossings when language no longer holds.
veiled
in various cultures and nations, mirrors are often associated with death and the otherworld. in Western tradition, there is a belief that if a person dies in the house, all mirrors should be covered so that the soul of the deceased does not get trapped in the reflection.
leaving
following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Green Park was transformed into vast accumulations of flowers. for days, people continued to bring bouquets, forming an almost ungraspable collective gesture of mourning.
this image reflects on how a figure personally unknown can nonetheless carry the hopes, disappointments, and emotional projections of countless individual lives.
the act of bringing flowers becomes a private ritual performed within an anonymous mass, a way to respond to death when no personal action feels sufficient. letters are written, bouquets are placed, not to be noticed, but to give form to grief that otherwise has nowhere to go.
Passing
many cultures imagine the soul as something that can move between human and animal forms. while reading about these beliefs, i found myself returning to one precise image: a black dog.
i contacted friends who had one and came to photograph her late at night. only one image from that encounter entered the project.
for me, it is not a portrait of an animal, but an attempt to imagine another possible state of being, where presence remains, but identity begins to shift.
A glance through the mask
it’s terrifying to think about your child’s future. what awaits her? what frightening accidents might lie in wait? the constant anxiety and worry for another human being, combined with the knowledge that you have little control over it, is an emotion deeply tied to motherhood.
Bite
in many cultures, eggs appear in funerary rituals and beliefs, carrying contradictory meanings of birth, death, and transition. they exist at both ends of life, as symbols of origin and of departure.
after the death of my close friend’s grandmother, i decided to work with eggs as part of a personal ritual. instead of photographing them fresh, which would evoke familiarity and domestic celebration, i boiled the eggs and waited for them to spoil. the smell, the process of decay, and the physical discomfort became an essential part of the work.
for me, this was not a metaphor but a bodily action. a way to enter a different state of attention, where grief is not represented but experienced through material transformation.
in common silence
this image responds to the death of Alexei Navalny, a figure who, for many holders of Russian passports, came to symbolize the possibility of freedom, regardless of agreement with his personal political stance.
his death in prison was experienced as a shock and a rupture, generating a shared sense of horror and powerlessness. across the world, people gathered to mourn, but also to recognize one another, to momentarily see themselves reflected in others who oppose the political regime in Russia and feel unable to act directly. the act of gathering becomes both a farewell and a fragile form of visibility, a way to exist together in grief when political agency feels unreachable.
the photograph was intentionally shot on Washi film and push-processed, allowing the material qualities of the film to intervene in the image. rather than producing a faithful copy of reality, the grain, instability, and density of the film transform the scene into a subjective photographic experience, one that carries emotional distortion and uncertainty, mirroring the collective state of shock, grief, and powerlessness.
this image was made after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, at a moment when news reports increasingly reduced human loss to numbers: forty dead, one hundred, one thousand. as these figures multiplied, individual lives disappeared behind statistics. against the background of the war and the political reality in Russia, i began to feel that joy was no longer fully accessible, even when surrounded by beauty, sunlight, and celebration.
i do not experience mourning as something bound to a sacred building. for me, the world itself becomes a temple. this image grew out of that belief. i imagined a fragile memorial made of candlelight, placed not inside a church but under the open sky, by the sea.
the first attempt failed. the wind extinguished every flame. the second attempt also did not succeed. only on the third attempt, months later, during a stay on the island of Corfu, did the image finally emerge. at dawn, on the windowsill of an old villa overlooking the sea, i lit the candles once more. that the image came into being at a sunrise is essential for me. dawn is not a triumph or a resolution, but a quiet moment of hope that exists despite everything.
mourning the fallen in war
Coincidence
this photograph was taken at a Serbian cemetery, where we came to bury a close friend who had been staying in Belgrade and died there unexpectedly.
on that day, snow began to fall in the city, the first snow Belgrade had seen in two years. after the cremation, we stepped outside, and birds suddenly filled the sky. it was hard not to read this moment symbolically, as if he was saying goodbye to us in this way, through the snow and through the birds.
Muted
since the COVID pandemic, conversations about death have become increasingly frequent in my surroundings. i don’t know whether this is connected to the state of the world, or to the fact that i am getting older and beginning to notice death more often and more clearly.
this photograph was taken in one of those moments. i came to visit friends, and once again we spent a long time talking about the deaths of people close to us, about the war, and about the feeling that it is completely unclear what one is supposed to do with all of this.
in the image, the shape of a bird appears, with flowers visible through it. for me, this photograph feels permeated by that conversation and that state. the bird here is only a symbol, it no longer sings, and the flowers behind it, for some reason, resemble funeral flowers.
shot on film, the image does not record reality as it is, but carries a particular emotional density, holding a moment in which grief, confusion, and helplessness quietly coexist.
Privilege
this photograph was taken at Highgate Cemetery, on the old cemetery grounds dating back to the nineteenth century. everything there was covered in blooming wild garlic, a plant that, as we know, is believed to ward off vampires.
there is a strange feeling in walking through this place and seeing the graves of people who were buried hundreds of years ago. being buried there is not only a spiritual conversation about life and death, but also a very material one, about wealth, class, and who could afford to remain in such a place.
and of course, in 2024, to be buried in a cemetery like this, and simply from old age, feels like an incredible kind of luck, rather than something tragic.
it is striking to notice how my own perception shifts over the years, shaped by lived life and by everything that continues to happen around us.
these photographs were taken at the Tower of London in 2025, where nearly 30,000 ceramic poppies were installed to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, VE Day. what struck me most was the sheer abundance of flowers, a gesture that feels both beautiful and desperate. as Svetlana Adoneva writes, in the absence of ritual, flowers become a way to express what cannot be spoken, a way to act when nothing else feels possible.
shot on analogue film, with light leaks and material imperfections, the image moves away from documentary clarity. unexpectedly, the light leaks themselves formed the shape of a cross. this was not planned, it simply appeared through the process of photographing, and i was struck by how appropriate this unintended symbol felt in the context of collective mourning.
Overflow
need
Projection
Fragile
i traveled specifically to Dungeness to make this photograph, to the place connected with Derek Jarman. these are the same candles i lit there. the wind kept blowing them out, again and again. i would relight them, and they would go out once more. the only way to let them burn for a moment was to carefully shield them with my hands.
this felt like a very precise image of human life to me. a person is fragile, despite all their strength. and if we want the light of a human life to last longer, it has to be protected.
thinking about death, this is what i find myself doing, paying closer attention to life, guarding it, and holding it carefully so that it can continue to glow.
this is an ongoing project. i work on it slowly and sincerely: when the emotion of grief overwhelms me and i begin to imagine its visual form, or when i come across an important text that gives rise to images, i continue to photograph.