Sander van Wettum
Photos
My work deals with the experience of abstraction and alienation in the everyday built environment. I seek out urban places that seem to withdraw from their surroundings, with no apparent relationship to their environment or history. I am interested in the moment when the intended use context disappears, giving rise to an absurd new reality. Office parks after hours, new housing developments without inhabitants, or desolate beach resorts in winter. They are constructed environments that hold a certain optimistic promise, while they can also be seen as failed and depressing.
I take long walks in cities, and with my analog medium-format camera, I frame the reality I see, further removing these places from their context. In this way I create new spaces that form an imaginary landscape of typologies, ideas and atmospheres.y. This archive constitutes the source of my work: an autonomous space within which I can discover new internal connections, and from which I can create new realities and material forms.