A Hollow Garden

It was the time that after a breakup I was reunited with my long time partner with the intent to make a new beginning in our relationship. Then, quarantine started. All those months we were stranded in our house in the outskirts of Athens having not much to do.  We started taking long walks in the forests and hills around the house discovering new routes and  idyllic places.  As the months passed we spent more and more time outdoors due to the good weather, wandering around the blooming spring nature, surrounded by trees and beautiful landscapes.  We were constantly together.

Back at home, there were the screens, a lot of them, and we immersed ourselves into them. All our social life, our entertainment, and our work was in there, in this parallel universe. Even if this is not a new state of things, the pandemic accelerated it, imposed it and made it totally inevitable. For the time being digital spaces are the only spaces we can all meet. 

Living through these two opposite situations, the idea for this project titled “A Hollow Garden” was born.  A man, a woman, a garden, a beginning. 

While experimenting with 3D scanning (made possible by a LiDAR sensor on my smartphone ) I started documenting my everyday surroundings in nature and home, myself and him.  All those technologies, now widely available, such as VR, AR, 3D scans, photogrammetry and depthmaps capture distance, only what is in proximity can be captured while the horizon is always absent. The aesthetic of the produced footage is fragmented and prone to error. The viewing point is multiplying infinitely and escapes linear perspective.

In an era that everything is migrating to the digital world, facilitated by those constantly evolving technologies my intent was to find a way to intertwine those two opposite situations or dimensions , those two different ways of existing. I was wondering if a middle state could be achieved, if there is an equilibrium spot, where a garden can exist in the digital world not just as a hollow representation of it. But Nature, after all, is not just a visual experience. The warmth of sunlight, the scent of damp earth, the taste of ripe fruit, none of it translates onto a screen.

Then, in the summer of 2021, the forest burned. Wildfires devoured over 1.3 million hectares in Greece, part of an escalating climate crisis that threatens not only landscapes but entire species—ours included.

To present this body of work I envision a multilayered installation: large-format 3D scan prints mounted on walls, suspended on semi-transparent fabric. Some scans will take sculptural form, rendering the disembodied into tangible artifacts. The interplay between physical and digital comments on how our lived experiences are increasingly shaped by digital mediation,how Google Maps alters our sense of place, how online personas distort our perceptions of others. Alongside these images, a series of 3D-scanned flora from the now-burned forest will stand as “digital fossils,” questioning what can truly be preserved in an era where even memory is outsourced to data.