This project explores the idea of social borders through a medium of photography. Instead of documenting real-life social situations, I use the image of a door as a metaphor for boundaries and thresholds that shape human experiences. The door does not appear directly in the photos but appears as a structure in the code, because it is used as the reference image that builds the main body of the image. The door symbolises access, exclusion and transition, representing an invisible barrier that defines who can enter and who is left outside. By using digital photography manipulated by a hand-written code, I explore how borders and thresholds appear in subtle and poetic ways, reflecting on how opportunities can open up, close down or remain uncertain. The project also explores how these themes relate to privilege and inequality, thus becoming a personal reflection on my own position and the conditions that have allowed me to cross borders and boundaries in life.

The project is envisaged as a series of staged yet abstract photographs that symbolically express the experience of boundaries and transitions. The photographs themselves then become a medium - data to be manipulated and transformed in a Python program. This computer program, written by me, uses two images: one as a source and the other as a reference. The program fragments the images into small tiles, compares their colours and then rebuilds the reference image using tiles from the source image, so the final picture becomes a kind of photo mosaic where one image is structurally shaped by another.

By using an original code written by me to work with the photographs, I challenge the idea of photography as a transparent record and treat images more like raw material that can be cut, rearranged and forced into new relations. For me, this method is also a way to think about photography as both image and data at the same time. Choices like tile size, colour matching or resolution are not only technical but also conceptual, because they relate to visibility, erasure and control inside the image. In this way, the work does not only show borders from the outside, but it also performs them through the process of making. In this way, the work connects to critical refusal because it refuses the idea that a photograph should give clear proof. The body is there, but it stays hard to read. By breaking the image into tiles and reducing detail, the work interrupts the normal way we look for identity and certainty. It makes the viewer slow down, step back, and sit with uncertainty instead of getting a clean answer.