Tender Buttons

work in progress 

At eighteen, I left home to become someone. I studied, I travelled, I fought, I surrendered, I won, I failed. Yet every time I went back, those hard-earned identities faded in an instant, as if they couldn’t survive past the border of that world. And then it was just me again, stripped of those newly acquired truths, learning how to walk.

On one of those returns, I came across the American writer Gertrude Stein’s book Tender Buttons. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but that felt kind of like the point. At first glance, her words appeared harmonious, but they quickly showed their unorthodox nature. I read, and then read again, hoping to connect the dots, yet the meaning kept slipping out of reach. And I was left there puzzled, wishing my arms were longer. That delicate line between sense and nonsense, tranquility and chaos, playfulness and seriousness, carried an emotional truth I knew too well.

Tender Buttons is a series of photographs I developed while visiting my hometown as an adult. It is a coming-of-age chronicle, of fragility and existential questioning, of time spent with friends and in loneliness, with the provincial environment as a steady backdrop.