In Limbo (Jet Lag)

I travel long distance for work several times per year and have become discomfortably familiar with the exhaustion that accompanies this lifestyle: the pervasive feeling of disorientation, the perpetual state of tiredness, the prolonged lack of personal space.

My routine is this: I wake up, embark in a 20-hours long trip to the other side of the world. At arrival I try to guess which mix of alcohol and coffee will keep me awake until sunset and possibly sleep through the night. I spend a few days on the spot and repeat the same on the way back home.

After a couple of years of this, I decided to turn the lens inwards, to capture the essence of the trip itself, moving away from the glossy images of business classes and airport fun that airlines are feeding us with. My subjects are people feeling my same discomfort of travel and the liminal spaces in and around airports and airplanes.

In order to emphasize the complete interchangeability of these non-places, the photos are named after the codes of the flights and airports in which I took them.

My intention is to invite the viewers to empathize with the subjects or even to reminisce their own travel experience, by evoking the feelings of weariness, uncertainty, and claustrophobia that define being caught between time zones and continents.