Azov Horizons

“Azov Horizons” is an ongoing project started in 2019 that explores the territories around the Sea of Azov in search of the roots, symbols and metaphors telling of the current Russo-Ukrainian situation.

“Azov Horizons” is an ongoing project started in 2019 that explores the territories around the Sea of Azov - the little-known yet highly strategic northern extension of the Black Sea - in search of the roots, signs and metaphors telling of the current Russo-Ukrainian situation. Formerly an internal sea of the USSR, it has since become an international body of water bordered by both Russia and Ukraine. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the sea and all its ports are occupied by Russia.
Through the prism of summertime images conflicting with the usual iconography of the post-soviet world, this long-term project is a behind-the-scenes documentation of an area engulfed in the current struggle for control of Southern Ukraine, as well as an evocation of the current transformation of the Russian state into a propaganda-driven totalitarian regime and of the environmental issues at stake.
Over the summer of 2022 for Chapter III, the entirety of the Russian coast of the Sea of Azov, from Taganrog - a port-city near the Ukrainian border - all the way down into Russian-occupied Crimea, was documented.
This chapter follows last year’s Chapter II dedicated to the Ukrainian coast and cities such as Mariupol, which we didn’t know at the time would be a few months later engulfed by war and totally annihilated.
Over the summer of 2023 For Chapter IV, the project returned to Ukraine, as close as possible from the Azov Sea. The regions of Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kherson were documented to show the destruction and symbolism of a country at war in parallel to the previous chapter done in Russia.