I began making Surface near the end of five years living in Vienna, wanting to reflect on how the pandemic had reshaped the Austrian capital. With little German, much of Vienna remained linguistically closed to me; photography became my way of reading the city through close observation of its details.
The lockdowns curtailed movement and physical contact. Austria even legislated for compulsory vaccination, though the measure was suspended before it could be enforced. In that uncertain atmosphere, I sensed that more than daily life was being reorganised. Isolation seemed to harden distrust of mainstream media, while algorithmic echo chambers drew people into increasingly separate versions of reality.
Wien Hauptbahnhof offered a microcosm of this estrangement. Thousands pass through daily, rarely remaining longer than their journeys require. For a few moments, however, strangers occupy the same seats, handle the same doors and lean against the same glass. After the enforced distance of lockdown, these incidental forms of contact felt newly charged. Fingerprints, discarded cups and cigarette ends registered the presence of people already gone.
At first glance, the station appears frictionless: movement is directed, surfaces are cleaned, and disorder continually cleared away. Its coherence depends upon passing through. To stop and look is to see what the flow conceals—stains, fractures, fluids, abandoned objects and conspiracy slogans pasted to walls. Surface slips between commuters and these residual signs. The station’s maintained order began to resemble the post-pandemic world beyond it: persuasive at a distance, increasingly fragile under scrutiny.