Snowflakes

About Snowflakes

Snowflakes is an art project based on encounters with people in public spaces, where their momentary self-definitions are transformed into fleeting visual traces that reveal identity and post-identity as a fluid process; not who we are, but how we transform?

The work was based on a series of encounters in public spaces, where I asked passersby to define themselves at the moment of our meeting and to write this definition on carbon paper receipts, typically used for everyday transactions. We then added fine marks and small geometric lines to each sheet using pliers, transforming the writing into a visual trace resembling a fingerprint or a snowflake. As the pen pressed, the blue carbon appeared, producing two copies of each sheet: one kept by the participant.

Over three years, I met 784 people in various cities including Vienna, Venice, Jerusalem, Ramallah, the Golan Heights, Munich, Stockholm, Umeå, and Rome. Each sheet represented an individual encounter materialized as a temporary trace, documenting not identity per se, but its fragility and constant transformation. The project evolved into a compositional work combining archival documents with video art, presenting animated forms resembling snowflakes, alongside video displays of the written texts—an attempt to define identity as a mutable act.

At its core, “Snowflakes” was not a search for identity or for “who we are,” but for “how we transform.” Identity here is not a fixed given, but a dynamic moment shaped within the context of the encounter, changing with place, time, and language. Each self-definition opened the door to a new question, and each carbon trace generated another image that did not exactly match the original. In this sense, the project can be seen as a live deconstruction of the idea of essential identity differences, multiplicity, and non-conformity.

This experience showed that what occurs during artistic creation is not the execution of a pre- existing idea, but a process based on digression, transforming repetition, and small deviations that generate meaning. From this, the core questions of this research emerged.

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