Nothing passes clean when the current enters us

Nothing Passes Clean When the Current Enters Us began during the Vice Versa Triangle residency in Gardinovci, a small village on the banks of the Danube. Arriving without personal ties to the region, I started by walking.

The project developed through repeated movement along the riverbanks, collecting objects, observing traces left by water, and following encounters between the landscape and everyday life. Rather than approaching the Danube as a subject to be documented, I became interested in it as an active force: something that shapes movement, memory, labour, and perception.

The work combines photography, found materials, and experimental printing processes, including cyanotypes made using water collected from the river itself. In this way, the Danube does not merely appear within the images but becomes physically involved in their production. The landscape enters the work as a collaborator rather than a backdrop.

The title reflects a simple realization: no encounter with a place leaves us unchanged. Currents carry sediment, reshape riverbanks, and alter everything they touch. Human movement through a landscape follows a similar logic. We leave traces, but we are also shaped by the environments we pass through.

Rather than documenting a specific location, the project explores a state of entanglement between body, memory, material, and place. It asks how a landscape enters us, how we absorb it through movement and attention, and how its presence continues to act upon us long after we have left.

*

The first stage of a project was exhibited in Gardinovci, Serbia as a part of the Vice Versa Triangle Residency.