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Ideal Place is a series of rather neutral photographic portraits combined with the statements of the protagonists about their personal understanding of the term “ideal place”, be it an abstract notion or an existing physical location. The answers are taken from interviews with people between 17 and 33 years of age, who were born and live in different countries of Eastern Europe.

These countries underwent a long period of socialist government, which had, in most texts dealing with the idea of Utopia, been prescribed as an ideal system. Various projections of Utopia have always been based on the principle of equality, thereby supressing the individual desires and dreams in the name of the general good. Therefore, I asked ordinary people, the ones who reached their adulthood in the post-communist era, to express their own idea(l)s.

All the chosen people were photographed standing in “pastoral” settings (parks, fields, woods, countryside) to avoid any direct social context. They stated their name, age, as well as the city and country of their birth, before formulating as short as possible their ideal place. The series compares a variety of clichés related to Utopia, based on the individual experiences and personal desires of young people from Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the project, besides pointing to the underlying social issues, primarily draws attention to similarities in convictions and naive notions of happiness of people, regardless of the place from which they come.