When I was a child, almost every weekend, I used to hike with my mom in the Carpathian Mountains. I counted the days till the next trip. Climbing up the peaks we reached higher altitudes through narrow trails where fear made me freeze. I kept going amazed by the surrounding nature and the mysterious mountain sceneries. Sometimes if I liked a place, we would stop and I would draw a sketch. When we returned home, I painted from memory what caught my eye on the mountain.

Years later, in the Carpathian wilderness, as a photographer, I was looking for stories of people who endured in the middle of nature, up on the mountains across generations. Over time, I needed to understand better what my presence meant in this space. Why do I feel an intense attraction to return to this place? Of all the places I have been to, this is the only place where I feel like home. When I am in a forest up in the mountains, I am in a place I want to know as much as possible – to have that feeling of belonging to a place - as Agnes Varda said “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.”

“Handful of Earth” project started to take shape in 2017. At some point, I realized that for me a place can have a certain sound, a unique musicality. While editing, ambient, experimental and electroacoustic music were my inspiration. I was searching for sequences or individual images that resonated with the emotions unique to a specific place, as though these images were short film sequences, each with its own intensity and soundtrack.

Above all, what was most important for me was to have a genuine connection with the space and that the story I was telling was sincere – as a mirror of the self. I wanted to portray the mountain space the way I imagined it, how it contains fragments of our lives. Family photos, the house we were born, now abandoned, the faint memory of a person we loved, a clearing in the forest reminiscent of childhood, or a hill covered with snow where we find peace.

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