i was alone until i wasn’t

I Was Alone Until I Was Not is a series of analog photographs, some of them self-portraits, brought together in a looping photographic animation. The series features my Saturn Masks, mirrored masks that I conceived in preparation for my upcoming short film. Their fabrication was entrusted to costume designer Philippine Lefèvre.

The project draws inspiration from Huayan Buddhist philosophy (Kegon in Japan), and more specifically from the metaphor of Indra’s Net. It describes an infinite net with a reflective jewel at each intersection. Every jewel reflects all the others, which in turn reflect the entire net, creating an endless interplay of reflections within reflections. This image embodies the principle of the interpenetration of all phenomena: each part contains the whole, while the whole is reflected in each of its parts.

In the 7th century, the Chinese Buddhist master Fazang is said to have illustrated this principle by arranging ten mirrors facing one another around a statue of the Buddha illuminated by a flame. The reflections multiplied seemingly infinitely, with each image appearing within all the others. This experiment, both philosophical and visual, became a central reference in the conception of my masks.

By covering the face with reflective surfaces, I seek to give tangible form to the intuition that consciousness is not separate from the world, but intimately connected to everything around it. The face disappears behind the reflections, while the boundaries between the observer and the observed become increasingly uncertain.