Mare Nexus

Concept

Mare Nexus is a body of 96 stitched cyanotypes made from photographs taken near submarine cable landing stations around the Mediterranean. These are the physical points where the undersea cables carrying the majority of global internet traffic come ashore; infrastructure that is largely invisible, unmarked, and rarely photographed, although almost all cross-continental data passes through it. The images were crowdsourced, gathered from contributors [who were found using the geotag on Instagram and contacted to participate] positioned near landing sites from Gibraltar to Morocco, turning the work into a distributed survey rather than a single photographer's account of the coastline.

Execution

Each photograph was processed as a cyanotype [the digital photograph was printed on a transparency and developed using cyanotype], and the resulting prints were stitched together into a single continuous horizontal band, joining the individual sites into one unbroken sequence that mirrors the cable route itself: discrete physical locations rendered as a single continuous line. The stitching is hand-sewn and visible as a seam between each print, so the join between sites remains legible rather than smoothed away. Installed as a wall-mounted piece, the piece measures 22.95 meters in length as it was stitched to fit perfectly into the gallery room at CIRCOLO, Milan (2025).