Coincidences Are Not Accidental / 2013

130 works, 60*90 cm

film photography 
 2013 

This project was born from an insistent question of mine: what remains of our human, unpredictable essence in a world where everything seems calculated, planned, and tracked? I decided to stage a sabotage of my own control. I took a single roll of medium format film. First, I methodically, almost like a cartographer, photographed Rome—its stones, shadows, the flow of tourists. Then, without rewinding, I used the same roll of film to shoot London—its rains, skies crisscrossed with wires. I consciously surrendered the outcome to chemistry, light, and pure chance. How would these two cities layer onto each other? What new, third reality would be born from this marriage of images, which I could not foresee? Here, chance is not a mistake, but a co-author. It did not destroy my frames—it stitched them into something else, not Rome nor London, but a phantom hybrid city that exists only on this filmstrip. Why did I choose film over digital? It is a physical witness to randomness, with an irreversible process. Digital is too predictable; my experiment is about the surrender of control. The overlay of a self-portrait is a gesture of voluntarily losing control: my “I” colliding with others gives birth to a third image—one that belongs to no one. The project’s question is not whether chance is powerful. The question is different: can this blind game create a value that cannot be planned? And what does this say about our planned lives? These double-exposed frames are my experiment. They are tangible proof that chaos doesn’t just exist. It can be generous. It can gift us a Roman pigeon perched on a London gentleman’s hat. And in this absurdity lies a strange, uncontrollable truth about the world that I was searching for. The power of chance lies not in luck, but in its ability to be a generator of unexpected meaning when you let go of control.