Ruins and Sacred Stones brings together monuments, remnants, and ritual sites scattered across Europe into a single, fictional, borderless territory. Originating in different countries, epochs, and belief systems, these structures are presented as elements of one continuous landscape in which national borders, historical hierarchies, and cultural distinctions are deliberately suspended.
This body of work is a continuation of a long-term photographic research into ruins, sacred stones, and overlooked sites. While earlier phases of the project focused on specific national contexts, the current chapter expands across Europe, deliberately dissolving geographic boundaries in favor of a shared, transnational terrain. The shift in scale reinforces the project’s central concern: not the documentation of heritage, but the construction of a territory defined by persistence rather than identity.
Across fields, forests, coastlines, and agricultural land, ruins appear as isolated objects—standing, protected, and quietly regulated. Small fences, signs, and minimal conservation measures recur throughout the work, revealing a paradoxical form of care: preservation persists even as lived belief, function, and collective memory have faded. Administration replaces ritual; maintenance replaces meaning. Why do we preserve these sites? What compels us to leave them standing rather than allowing them to disappear entirely?
The project focuses on lesser-known and marginal locations—places that fall outside canonical histories and monumental narratives. Often poorly documented, these sites remain protected, quietly held in place within the landscape. Taken over by nature, their human imprint diminishes, blending into their surroundings or standing oddly apart, possessing a restrained and unfamiliar beauty.
By photographing these sites with consistent distance, neutral light, and a restrained compositional language, the work removes the emotional cues typically associated with ruin imagery. There is no nostalgia, no dramatization of decay, and no narrative of loss. Instead, the ruins are treated as contemporary facts: structures that continue to occupy space long after their original religious, military, industrial, or symbolic functions have dissolved.
Sacred stones play a crucial role within this constructed territory. Predating architecture, nations, and institutional religion, they embody an older relationship between land and belief. Yet today they too are framed, catalogued, and fenced. Placed alongside architectural ruins, they collapse distinctions between the sacred and the secular, the monumental and the marginal. All become equal citizens within this invented country.

The current phase of my ongoing project is supported by a grant from Bildkunst/ Kulturwerk enabling further research and production across multiple European regions.