This triptych explores transitional spaces at three different scales — the personal, the public, and the structural. Each image reveals how thresholds shape human experience, holding tension between what is present and what is absent, between what moves and what waits, between what is built and what decays. Together, they form a narrative of the city as lived and felt in states of in-between.
1. Empty Tables at Los Cuates
Inside, the man sits alone, at the threshold of solitude and companionship—where the empty table outside echoes his silence and another type of company flickers in hand. The sequence opens with an intimate, human-scale moment. Solitude is framed not as isolation but as a threshold between presence and absence, companionship and disconnection.
At the intersections where directions meet and decisions are made. A brief pause before transition—where nothing happens. The focus shifts outward to the public street. The crossroads become a site of suspension, where anticipation holds more weight than action. This image locates the city as a stage of waiting and potential.
Framed by rusted fences, warehouses, and overgrown tracks—this scene foregrounds a city in tension—where growth and neglect coexist, and where beauty emerges from the collision of aspiration and abandonment. The triptych concludes with the city itself as the subject. Here the threshold is structural, where ambition and decay meet in uneasy balance. The skyline is less a horizon than a contested edge.
Two children rest against a low wall as traffic flickers in the distance. A mask slips down, a bag sits heavy, and the gaze of the girl fixes outward, quiet but unyielding. This opening image grounds the chapter in the tension of street life: the pause that is not stillness, the presence that is not settled. Here, the city hums behind them, indifferent, while their bodies hold a fragile claim to space.
The man, caught mid‑turn, seems unaware. Ironically, he’s both tantalizingly close and psychologically distant, separated by barriers. The construction panel hints at transition or repair, while the wilted bouquet suggests someone past their prime. Intimate yet isolating, we’re invited to observe, not listen. However, a narrow sliver of light pushes against the man's enclosure, offering a glimpse of hope.
Beneath massive concrete spans, small figures move in the light that cuts through the dark. The scale of the structure dwarfs them; survival unfolds in spaces of abandonment, where shelter is carved from neglect. This closing image amplifies the chapter’s arc: from the tentative pause on the sidewalk, to the fragmentation at the threshold, to the engulfing shadow of infrastructure. Here, the environment no longer simply presses against presence—it swallows it whole.
A word turned upside down.