Emilio Pemjean

The Land of the Lotus-Eaters explores territories that extend beyond the limits of the known world, those spaces charged with myths, fears, and projections of the imagination. As in the Homeric tradition, where Ulysses' companions forgot their return after tasting the lotus, the project investigates the desire to inhabit the unknown and the attraction to places that, although disappeared, remain essential to keeping alive the hope that the world retains unexplored areas. In antiquity, maps showed gray patches: incomplete, barely described spaces, where fantastic creatures and impossible landscapes emerged. Today, these voids have disappeared from cartography, but they survive in memory, in archives, and in the need to dream.

2 works in the series

Palimpsest addresses the tension between original innocence and the impossibility of return after the experience of pain, exposure, and the gaze of others. The patristic quote ("you carried within you the image of the first Adam...") confronts primal nakedness—pure, without shame—with the contemporary body, marked by scars, wear and tear, and the condition of being observed by the voyeur. This symbolic framework is transferred to architecture: spaces that once existed in painting as ideal settings, but which have disappeared in reality. Pemjean reconstructs them from three-dimensional models, based on pictorial representations that have turned these architectures into collective myths.

2 works in the series

The Bauen series constitutes an investigation into the relationships between human beings and the space they inhabit. Emilio Pemjean understands architecture as a resonance box where life and death, joy and pain, happen in the everyday. It is not merely a shelter, but a symbolic stage that reflects the utopias, tensions, and contradictions of those who occupy it and of the era in which it was conceived. The project is articulated through architectural models built to scale, which are subsequently transformed into photographic and video images. In this process, the work oscillates between the real and the illusory: the spaces did not always exist, but they become plausible, inviting us to question the certainty of what we perceive as true.

1 works in the series