In 2017 during a trip in Sicily in my family’s native country, I was told about a special place called “Scala dei Turchi”, a white clay beach with stunning and minimalist lunar landscapes. After some quick research on the internet, I took my camera and hit the road in the stifling heat toward this place.

On the spot, it was a disappointment. The purity of the place I imagined was totally covered by the private parking lots, the bars and restaurants, turning this place that was supposed to be magical into a packed tourist attraction. Upset, I only took a few photos of points of view I found interesting, thinking I would come back after the tourist season to avoid a crowd of visitors fond of selfies.

Back in Paris, something encouraged me to edit my photos. I decided to use them as a basis to artificially create the mental pictures I imagined during my trip. Erasing humans from these pictures enabled me to get them to the limits of abstraction, generating a new reality. By creating what I couldn’t reach, I turned this real landscape into a spiritual landscape, going from the reachable reality to the virtual world by using digital tools and photomontage, while questioning the links and dissonances between reality and mental pictures.