Once a Year is a personal visual diary from a place that is not my own, but that over the years began to become one. Aitoloakarnania,the land where my wife was born and raised was at first an unfamiliar region to me. A strange, raw landscape full of contradictions. Since 2012, when I first went there, I have been returning every year, letting photography act as a bridge between two different perspectives.The gaze of a “foreign” visitor and the memories of someone close to me.

Through a series of images, the work maps the peri-urban landscape of western rural Greece. But the project is not simply a geographical record. It is an attempt to understand a place through observation.An exploration of how the wild and the uncanny can gradually become familiar. Each return transforms my relationship with the landscape.From distance to connection, from curiosity to acceptance.

Once a Year documents this slow, recurring process of becoming acquainted with a place.A place that reveals itself little by little, as long as I persist in visiting it every year.