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The Sandbox is a personal documentary photography project that started developing during my critical design studies in Eindhoven, as a counterweight to the overly restrictive and stress-heavy institutional frame of design education.

In early 2020 I had started taking walks as a way to improve my mental heatlh during a chaotic period in my life. To keep myself engaged and motivated to walk, I started documenting the curious phenomena I encountered on my paths with my phone camera, a sort of exercise in looking, a game. Once I became attentive, the weird was everywhere.

The boring, prosaic, mundane surroundings of my hometown became full of absurdity and a source of awe. Organically, such documentation of curious details became an intuitive methodology that I began to call banalism; expressive documentary photography of the everyday. Surprisingly democratic, it followed my move to the Netherlands, where it became a way of coping with feeling of estrangement in a foreign environment, as well as a way of interpreting it and making it mine.

Eventually, the phone was upgraded to a camera which added a layer of formal exploration and experimentation to purely spontaneous and momentary encounters, largely determined by default technology settings. Furthermore, I became increasingly interested in capturing more dynamic aspects of my daily life; the people around me, our movements, activities, gestures - with the same curious gaze that tends to be stimulated by the absurd.

Out of fascination with what’s around and the need to document it a project started coming together; fragmented, eclectic, weird and honest. Like a sandbox, seemingly basic yet brimming with boundless potential, it’s following me organically, helping me to develop a visual language and evolve my photographic practice.