Solaris / 2012

film photography/ lit print 
20 works, 60*90 cm

This project began with a simple, almost childish question: what if Solaris isn’t out there, light-years away, but right here? Under our feet? In the glare on a puddle near home? I didn’t want to illustrate Lem or Tarkovsky, but to find a crack in the familiar. I armed myself with unusual lenses—a monocle and a tilt-shift. The monocle blurred the edges, turning a park bench into a phantom island. The tilt-shift flattened the perspective, making a field on the city’s outskirts resemble a miniature, strangely tense model. The light, passing through the imperfect glass, painted halos and flares—not defects, but traces of reality rubbing against optics. Each frame was an attempt to shift the fulcrum. Not to show “beautiful strangeness, ” but to provoke a question: what do we truly see when we look at a courtyard, a road, a vacant lot? Perhaps this is our “planet"—a territory where, through the mundane, the contours of something else, something personal and forgotten, emerge? The final, crucial step was the lith print for select frames. This capricious, manual printing process didn’t just reproduce the image; it materialized that very “quiver.” The paper absorbed the silver, intensifying contrasts, deepening shadows, rendering highlights into almost blinding spots. Each print became a unique cast of a moment of shift—not a digital simulacrum, but physical proof of an encounter between light, glass, chemistry, and that still-elusive something hiding behind form. This is not an answer to the question of essence. It is an invitation to look closer at the tremor of your own perception.