SOMA / CHAPTER 3

The title comes from the brand name of the narcotic that subjugates the people dominated by the “World State” in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel “Brave New World.” SOMA is a tool of social control, a drug that quells all traces of sentiments.
Any individual who dares to doubt the order established by the totalitarian authority is relegated to a desert island. In the novel, the sensitive and highly intelligent protagonist Bernard Max is exiled for these very reasons.
Through SOMA, I sought to expand upon Huxley’s fairly limited description of Bernard’s voyage of exile, setting its visual narrative against the backdrop of brutalist architecture.
On the one hand, its futurist mien is an ideal fit to the story playing out in the distant future. On the other, it reflects similar notions of the utopian social ideals that are at the heart of brutalist urbanist concept as a characteristic component of every totalitarian system. In both instances, a utopia ultimately evolves into a dystopia – sooner or later.

Between 2013 and 2020, I set out to compile a photographic collection of architectural objects in the brutalist style. I shot them in a way that the images flow one into the other in a fluid way, meshing these pieces of a geometric puzzle into a unified whole.
In SOMA, architecture is what paves the physical path that Bernard is forced to take, yet it also endows a sense of rhythm to his subsequent intellectual evolution.
To maintain the sense of constancy between the images and the subject itself, I took all the photographs with the medium-format
Kiev 60 and Carl Zeiss lenses, which both were originally produced under the auspices of a totalitarian regime.