ENCRYPTED PURGATORY

Encrypted Purgatory presents a series of staged photographic scenes that evoke a nostalgic and mediated vision of an allegorical future. The work explores the construction of reality and time through fiction, shaped by the spectacle and illusion produced by contemporary image culture. Within these compositions, past and present appear to collapse into a shared temporal space, generating a visual tension between archaic symbols and the emerging technologies of the digital age.

Through carefully constructed environments and hybrid characters, the project reflects on humanity’s evolving relationship with technology and the myths that surround ideas of progress, uniqueness, and artificial evolution. Primitive gestures, ritualistic objects, and futuristic references coexist within the same frame, suggesting a speculative world in which the boundaries between human, machine, and cultural memory become increasingly unstable. The images operate as fragments of a possible future, where technological ambition and existential uncertainty intertwine.

Rather than presenting a dystopian narrative, Encrypted Purgatory constructs a poetic yet ambiguous landscape where technological desire and collective imagination shape new symbolic systems. In this space, fiction becomes a tool to question how contemporary society projects its anxieties, aspirations, and fears into imagined futures.

The project was presented at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles (2018), where it was shortlisted for the New Discovery Award, situating the work within an international dialogue on photography, speculative futures, and the role of the image in constructing alternative narratives of technological transformation.