Fins demà, si Déu vol… (“See you tomorrow, if God wills it.”)

“May your memory not be too fragile,” says Pau Riba in one of my favorite songs. In 2021, I moved to Rotterdam, leaving a life behind to begin a new one. Every time I return home, I am overwhelmed by an immense fear of forgetting all those small moments I share with my family: my grandmother cooking every Sunday, our shop Ca l’Espinach, my father reading on the sofa, all of us singing after a meal… I have this immense fear that nothing will be as it once was, of saying goodbye for the last time and closing a chapter. Distance turns the familiar into something fragile, and every goodbye feels definitive.

My aunt Núria says, “Fins demà, si Déu vol” (“See you tomorrow, if God wills it.”) before going to sleep. And it feels as though tomorrow we might wake up and nothing will be there anymore.

Photography allows me to make these moments eternal. It gives me access to a space-time where I am not physically present, yet one I can return to whenever I need. I live with the obsession of documenting and preserving so as not to lose. With the desire that, the day all of this is no longer here, I will still have the photographs to remember the days when I was happy.

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Instagram: @ulldenimfa

Fish tail

I grew up in a family full of contradictions—care and constraint, intimacy and distance. These seemingly opposing emotions intertwined to create a subtle yet genuine atmosphere. In some families within Chinese society, love is not only expressed through care and dedication but is also often accompanied by unspoken sacrifice.

“Fish tail” is a metaphor and microcosm of such family relationships: “You eat the fish belly; Mom and Dad will just have the tail.” This model of education, based on self-sacrifice, is passed down through generations under the logic of “It’s all for your own good.” It shapes our understanding of love and quietly influences children’s self-confidence, emotional expression, and sense of self-worth.

Through an online call for submissions, I came to know many peers who share similar childhood experiences. As a narrator, I listened to their stories while intentionally maintaining a certain distance from the subjects. This distance is both visual and emotional—not a closeness that intrudes, but a silent gaze grounded in respect. It reflects the very theme I seek to explore: in many family relationships, intimacy and estrangement coexist, and emotional expression is often restrained or difficult to articulate.

I hope that viewers, when looking at these images, can feel that emotional tension—so close, yet just out of reach—and be prompted to reflect more deeply on the ways emotions are expressed within family relationships.

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Website: yulaixu.com
Instagram: @yulai.xu

Threads of War

With my project ‘Threads of War’ I have taken images that I originally produced within conflictive areas whilst working as a reportage photographer and worked on them to draw attention to the subjects, and to honour them. By printing the photos onto material and then adding embroidery I want the images to become ‘domesticated’, more approachable and more beautiful but to still convey a message.The much slower process inevitably invites contemplation and immersion.

I started this work out of necessity, unable to travel during the pandemic, but have continued it as many of the areas where I have worked in the past – notably Afghanistan, Sudan and Gaza, have become impossible or too difficult, expensive and dangerous to visit. I want to use this work to make an intervention, to draw attention to current conflicts and make a bridge between the actual theatre of war and the human lives affected by it.

Afghanistan

When the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in 2002 I was horrified by how quickly women lost their rights and freedoms. Women doctors, teachers, politicians, students whom I had met, spent time with, travelled with, were all suddenly confined to their homes unable to work, study or move freely. In response to my anguish and their terrible situation I made a series of portraits where I embroidered over their faces to signify what they had lost. Each image is dedicated to a group of women.

Sudan

Sudan was one of the first countries where I travelled by myself. I made a children’s book in a village in Darfur (1985) and then made many return trips working for non governmental agencies, including Save the Children and Oxfam. I have used photos from those trips to create the series ‘Torn Apart by War’ to reflect the current situation where the country is literally ravaged by economic and political struggle. It is a severely brutal war with millions displaced, thousands killed, and widespread sexual violence. By physically ripping photos I want to echo the ruptures in people’s lives.

Gaza

I have worked in Gaza half a dozen times – during the First Intifada (1988), during the 1990s, and during the 2009 violence. Watching the present war on television has been traumatic – knowing the warmth of Palestinian hospitality, the creativity of children , the bravery of local journalists. The series of embroideries I have made are my personal expression of helplessness in the face of politics.

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Website: jennymatthews.photoshelter.com

Instagram: @jennymphoto

Greetings from Yugoslavia

Greetings from Yugoslavia takes as its point of departure a set of 24 postcards drawn from two long-term bodies of work: Strange Bedfellows (Jugolaboratorija) (2003–2014) and [un]familiar[ities] (2011–ongoing). Material from both series is woven into a single constellation, focusing on scenes and environments where historical transitions have quietly shaped the emotional texture of the place.
The postcard set is expanded into a spatial installation integrating postcards with material photographic works and video sequences. These elements unfold across different scales and temporalities, forming a new configuration that allows for a more immersive and spatial encounter.

The images originate from regions marked by the gradual transformations following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Rather than depicting events or individuals, the works trace subtler imprints of change: atmospheres of hesitation, residual structures, and the quiet adjustments through which societies reorient themselves. The project attends to how history embeds itself in the everyday, accumulating indirectly through space and mood.

Guided by an interest in the unstable boundary between recognition and estrangement, and informed by Boris Groys’s reflections on the exchange between the familiar and the foreign, the work explores moments where perception shifts and the ordinary becomes subtly displaced. Across its iterations, Greetings from Yugoslavia reflects an ongoing practice of observing how the past continues to resonate within the present.

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Website: alengrudix.dk

DEAR ORCHID

There are no photographs from the year my sisters, eight and ten at the time, fled Sarajevo at the beginning of the war. What remains is a diary, written by my oldest sister. She wrote through displacement, and that writing became the only testimony in our family archive that speaks to a time I did not witness but have come to know through her words and the stories passed down within our family—a time that has deeply impacted the course of our lives and continues to shape my sense of family, identity, and belonging.

The diary covers a period from spring 1992 to winter 1993, during which they moved through several temporary homes across Croatia before eventually settling in Zagreb. In Dear Orchid, I return to these places with my other sister and our father. Using the diary as a guide, we traced a path from Sarajevo to Hvar, Jelsa, and finally Zagreb, revisiting landscapes carrying the memory of their displacement.

This act of return, personal, political, and embodied—asks how the postwar generation might carry its inheritances with care and responsibility. To engage with the archive is to engage with history not as past, but as structure, active, transmitted, and embedded in the present, carried through generations of sisterhood. The archive, like grief, demands to be held, as something unfinished, unresolved, and still urgently alive.

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Instagram: @hana_selena

I STAY, I RESIST

Beirut, Lebanon. A few days after the fragile ceasefire, a hint of life seems to have returned to inhabit the streets: but life, among the veins of the capital, has never stopped flowing, not even during the two months of indiscriminate Israeli bombing. The media representation of the war between Israel and Hezbollah has given the West an image of Beirut devastated by bombing, reducing entire neighborhoods to piles of rubble, which remain deserted today; other areas, however, are full of displaced people who find refuge wherever they can, even in the streets and along the seafront.

The media coverage from various correspondents in the field focused on the front lines and war scenes, providing an incomplete narrative of this historical moment, thus risking concealing the other-human face of a city that, still in disbelief of the peace so laboriously achieved, has instead been accustomed to war, or has had to adjust quickly, finding tools of resistance in daily life, in the apparently simple act of staying and continuing to live. Through the voices of women, youth, children, and the elderly; volunteers, journalists, and restaurateurs; passing from overcrowded markets to empty clubs, from schools turned into shelters to the hectic corridors of a hospital; from the nostalgia of Lebanon’s golden age to the innocence of children in a Palestinian refugee camp, to the serene, yet conscious acceptance of the surrounding turmoil by a man smoking shisha on the beach, the project has collected the human stories of fourteen people two months after the start of the latest escalation of violence impacting Lebanon, involving the capital. It attempts to fill an information gap and present a more varied image of the plural, diverse faces that Beirut embodies, despite the war.

Circumstances in which a photograph was taken:
Almost all the photos were taken with a tripod and flash. When there was someone around I asked them to hold the flash for me, otherwise I would shoot the self-timer and run to keep the flash myself. Subjects portrayed chose the pose they preferred, when needed I only asked them to turn slightly towards the light.

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Website: alessiocassaro-photo.com/
Instagram: @alessiocassaro

Neuromantic

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Website: anacvallejo.com
Instagram: @anacvallejo

Silent Voices

An iconography of dehumanisation

The project “Silent Voices” explores the inner pain of a society witnessing genocide. It draws on the daily flow of images from Gaza, which have become part of our collective memory — an iconography of dehumanisation, of ethnic cleansing, orchestrated starvation, genocide. At the intersection of performance and photography, the project reconstructs these images within the urban landscape.

The portrayed individuals are random passers-by encountered by Peter Casaer in the streets of Brussels. Their daily routine is suddenly and unexpectedly interrupted as he immerses them in another reality. It is a confronting and frightening experience. Deeply buried emotions often resurface: sorrow, frustration, anger, pain. And a profound sense of incomprehension at the erosion of political morality in the face of the continuous violations of international law, of crimes against humanity.

Across all segments of society, individuals share a mounting sense of powerlessness – of not being heard. They are the Silent Voices.

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Website: petercasaer.be
Instagram: @peter_casaer

Map of Memories (2020 – ongoing)

While global attention focuses on the war in Ukraine, Russian aggression and changes in US politics, a country caught in an authoritarian deadlock often goes unnoticed. Belarus remains under constant pressure from Moscow on one side and from nearly three decades of Lukashenko’s rule on the other.

The aftermath of the fraudulent 2020 elections and the crushed democratic movement is still unfolding: repression continues, exile communities grow, and former political prisoners face ongoing uncertainty. My project documents this unresolved aftermath, tracing displacement, resistance, and a nation suspended between past and future. It shows how life after state control does not end when people cross a border, but continues to shape bodies, relationships, and identity in exile. I am part of this story. This is my life and experience too. My photography is not only documentation; it is an attempt to understand what it means to be Belarusian when the homeland becomes more of a memory than a place.

The Belarusian experience shows and warns that repression, emigration, and the disappearance of civil society are not just a national tragedy but part of the global struggle for democracy in a world where authoritarianism is rising again.

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Website: pkritchko.com
Instagram: @pkritchko

Love letters from the war

Love Letters from the War explores how war continues to echo through memory and emotional legacy — not through visible violence, but through the quiet struggle to remain human. The project is based on nearly one thousand field letters my German grandfather Karl wrote to my grandmother between 1943 and 1945.

In these letters, I expected to find fear, violence, and hardship, but instead I found tenderness and the will to hold on to love and dignity in times of moral collapse. This project offers an intimate glimpse into the inner world of an ordinary man. He was not a hero in any conventional sense, nor did he perform grand gestures or make history. His actions were small and humble – writing daily letters to his wife, reflecting on fleeting moments of beauty, and staying connected to what truly mattered.

The work combines three visual layers: original letters and documents, archival family photographs from the 1940s, and AI-generated visualizations that imagine moments never photographed but vividly described. Together they form a dialogue between reality and imagination, history and emotion.

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Website: hannoketterer.com
Instagram: @hannoketterer