Danae Panagiotidi

The project began as a personal response to my mother’s encounter with altered states of consciousness. Her recollections from that time, dream-like fragments, fluid images, and visions hovering between memory and fantasy, resembled Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) as described in transpersonal psychology and consciousness studies. These accounts, situated between scientific observation and mystical narrative, broke through the surface of ordinary perception and opened a space for questioning: what does it mean to exist in- between?

Rooted in the personal yet informed by research, the work moves between documentation and inner landscape, between scientific reference and emotional metaphor. Scientific thought informs the work as a way of looking rather than explaining. Ideas of observation, uncertainty, parallel states, and phenomena that can be detected but not fully grasped echo through the images, not as illustrations but as underlying structures.

Moving between the intimate and the impersonal, the seen and the felt, the photographs inhabit a suspended space where time slows, boundaries soften, and identity loses its shape, while meaning emerges gradually, like an afterimage still forming. Liminality here is not merely a passage but a state of becoming, a dissolution that holds the potential for renewal. The project invites reflection on transition and the invisible forces that shape our sense of reality, offering the

unknown not as something to fear, but as a space for transformation and reconnection.

This project was selected by Gian Marco Sanna for the Discarded magazine prize during the liquida photo festival in Turin.