Nerea – Inhabiting Elsewhere

Can we belong to a place that is not home?
Some places have the ability to reshape the way we perceive ourselves while remaining fundamentally unfamiliar. It is within this tension that my practice begins.

For a long time, I believed that photography was a way of preserving memory. Over time, I came to understand that, within my own practice, photography serves a different purpose. It is not about remembering a place, but about observing how a place reshapes the way we inhabit the world.
From this perspective, belonging is not a quality of places.
It is a relationship.
It is not defined by ownership, permanence, or the idea of home. Instead, it emerges when a landscape, a piece of architecture, or a horizon temporarily redefines the relationship between body, memory, and identity.

Nerea grew out of this reflection.
It is neither a pseudonym nor an alternate identity. It is an artistic practice that exists alongside the work I produce under my own name, Sofia Mangini, born from the need to explore a dimension of my practice that could not be fully expressed through my architectural photography. While that body of work examines the relationship between the individual and the built environment through form, geometry, and structure, Nerea focuses on the experiential dimension of space, exploring how landscape becomes a means of questioning memory, identity, and belonging.

Even the name reflects this tension.
Nerea evokes the sea and the ideas of movement, crossing, and transformation. At the same time, in Basque, it means “what is mine.” These two seemingly opposing meanings coexist within the same practice: understanding how something can become deeply ours while remaining temporary.

Within this framework, landscape is never the true subject of the image.
Rather than describing a place or constructing a recognizable representation of it, my work explores how space acts upon the body, reshaping perception and altering our experience of being in the world. The photographs do not document places. They reveal relationships.
My practice unfolds through the encounter between body and space. The subject is not the landscape itself, but the way it reshapes our perception of body, time, and belonging.
It is at the moment when a place ceases to function as a backdrop and becomes something we inhabit that my work begins.
It is within that threshold, between what feels familiar and what remains foreign, that my research takes shape.

For this reason, the body appears frequently throughout my images. Not as an autobiographical subject or the protagonist of a narrative, but as a tool for observation. Self-portraiture becomes a research device, a minimal presence through which the relationship between identity and space becomes visible.
The body is not the subject of my photographs. It is the place where our relationship with space becomes visible.

The places that recur throughout my work are not chosen for their form or symbolic value, but for their capacity to alter perception. Water, architecture, and the desert become perceptual devices through which I observe how the body continually redefines its relationship with space. The images emerge from this process, where landscape is no longer something to be represented, but a condition capable of generating experience.

The images that form Nerea develop slowly. They do not pursue the spectacular or the exceptional. Instead, they seek moments of stillness, waiting, and suspension.
I am interested in what remains once the noise disappears.
That brief moment when landscape ceases to be a backdrop and becomes an inner condition.
For this reason, the photographs do not follow a chronological order. They may belong to different journeys, years, and geographies, yet they continue to speak to one another because they are driven by the same question. Each project intentionally remains open, like an inner geography in constant transformation. These images are not about where I have been, but about what those places have made possible.

Perhaps this is what Nerea is ultimately about.
Not searching for places to belong to, but questioning that fragile and temporary relationship in which what was once unfamiliar briefly ceases to be so.
Perhaps inhabiting elsewhere does not mean finding a place to call home. It means recognizing those rare moments when what was once foreign ceases to be so and becomes, if only for an instant, a place of belonging.

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Text and Photos by Sofia Mangini