Mad World

People and places, places and people, two things I’ve always connected very deeply to.

I always realized my brain worked differently then other peoples, and now that’s almost set in stone, recently after having a lot of anxiety episodes, and breakdowns, and emocional crashes, I tried to dig deeper into my school files, and my early psychologist files from when I was 13 years old, and oi if I found things, he diagnosed me with attention disorder and hyperactivity, social problems, amongst other things and and high IQ, and that meant since a very young age my mind and body raced a lot, and sometimes not at the same time, but nothing was effectively made about it, not in school, and not in my day to day life, I know my parents tried within what was available to them in a very small town in rural Portugal, my mom even got verbal abuse from a pediatrician when I was only about 5, because she always knew something in me was different, and the doctor told her “moms these days don’t want to get any trouble from their children”. All of this to make you understand that my connection to places and people was always very important, because it was what made me feel safe, and useful, and grounded in a way.

Nowadays with my very high anxiety, and mental health issues, this became even more important, and through my photography this became very evident, in this zine, I explore my recent post lockdown relationships. The new people I’ve met and the new places I’ve conec- ted to, and how the experiment of photographing these people in set places.