Marco Bell

Traces is an ongoing exploration of impermanence, gesture, and the quiet poetics of unpredictability. Photography, as a medium, is often seen as a tool of control—framing, freezing, fixing—but it is also deeply tied to chance. In this project, chance is not an obstacle but a collaborator.

Working with analog processes, performative actions, and ephemeral materials, I wanted to embrace the limitations of the medium and make those limitations part of the act itself. A spill, a fracture, a blur, a missed moment—each becomes a gesture, a residue of something unrepeatable.

Traces inhabits the space between image and event, where the photograph is not a document of something whole, but a fragment of something slipping away. The works ask: how do we hold on to what refuses to be held? How do we record the uncontainable? What remains is not the event itself, but its trace—a fragile imprint of something that has already begun to disappear.