Metaphors from a Tempus Malum represent an imaginary archive of a journey during the first lockdown, embedded with fragments of monochromatic images of scanned botanic species.

The series was created during the first lockdown of the Coronavirus epidemic when personal space was minimized and there was a sense of an apocalypse.

At that time, I needed a calm reflective space in which I could reflect the feeling of helplessness, fear, and uncertainty. This series seeks to create a metaphor for the corona epidemic based on the natural process of seed dispersal. The imaginary anthropomorphism process aims to deconstruct the stages of the epidemic and find parallel images in plant dispersal.

I started to collect dry plants, seeds, and thorns during the first lockdown on my morning walk that exceeded the permitted range (an act of a personal protest(.

The in-depth observation of plants reflected the course of the epidemic: the spreading phase, the lockdown, the capsules, the mass infections due to public gatherings and death experienced, and the hope for a vaccine.

The choice of scanning rather than photography contributed to the experience of confinement: spending your time in a dark space, in which the scanner light flashes and illuminates the plant samples.

These scans are therefore an attempt to touch objects, minimize them, change and uproot them from their habitats. This tendency to concretization versus abstraction. All images are loaded fragments devoid of their colors, disconnected from the continuum of life, and are now floating in black frightening emptiness.

Thus, scanning seed’s pods simulate states of isolation and social remoteness and the large density of seeds reflects a mass infection event.

These images are all attracted to each other through the power of trauma. The trauma, which constantly stands between the political and the mental, between concrete and abstract, is like a fragment that is simultaneously touching and detached.