I started the project when I was studying for my master’s degree. It was a very specific moment in time. It was around one year after the referendum – the smell of Brexit in the air – and everybody was talking about it, so I decided to use this momentum and produce work about it.
Besides, I wanted to develop and expand my horizon as an artist, though not sure “how” and “in which direction” to go. Brexit is something hard to photograph – everybody talks about it and everybody has an opinion on it, but still, it’s so complex; and that’s why it was impossible to approach this subject in a conventional way.
I was photographing for about half a year in the outer boroughs of London where the majority of people voted for Brexit. At the same time I was visiting the inner districts that overwhelmingly voted for remain. These boroughs felt completly different to me and of course there was Westminster, the political centre of London. While photographing, I was researching in-depth in the libraries about the topic and doing screenshots from all sorts of Youtube videos from crucial events. At some point, I felt that the amount of material I collected was overwhelming, but I also realized that most of the images weren’t “mine”.
There was a period when I tried to combine the visuals through collages. That was a sort of transition period when I felt closer to what I wanted to say, closer to the question of ” How did it happen?”, yet still, it felt like a compromise.
In the end, the imagery that ended up in the book is only found footage.