In 2021, after a great fire swept through Schinos, I found myself standing in a bare landscape, stripped of life.
It was there that Picnic at Schinos was born. A family of friends agreed to join me in this desolate place, to lay out a tablecloth, to share a picnic while wearing gas masks.
I am not certain whether this is a scene of intimacy or estrangement, a ritual of memory or a fleeting act of resistance. The images remain motionless, silent, withholding answers, offering no assurances. Perhaps the masks protect, perhaps they only estrange us further. The question drifts unresolved, hovering somewhere between memory and awakening — or dissolving into nothing at all.
What rises to the surface is the presence of the moment itself: the stillness, the silence, the gaze caught behind the glass of the mask, the ground that seems to smolder even now. And within this uncertainty, a small, insistent spark of life endures.
