Iulia Enkelana (the pseudonym of Iulia-Maria Kyçyku, born in 1999 in Bucharest, in a Romanian and Albanian family) is the author of a several short films (officially selected in international film festivals), short stories (published in Romanian and Albanian cultural magazines), plays, essays and two online albums: ‘eyeland’ (drawings) and ‘do you remember your first loneliness?’ (photographs). She is currently studying theater in Cluj-Napoca.
The photographs I take are illustrations of moods and abstract ideas related to the main themes that interest me equally in my visual work and my writing: identity and self-knowledge, memory and oblivion, unnoticed beauty of everyday life, freedom and its consequences, the border between life and art, dreams, love and loneliness, faith, the various interpretations of death. In photography, I often follow a cinematic thinking: I shoot pictures that remind me of cinema and make me imagine unmade films.
I believe in the importance of creativity and the clearness of expression more than in technical perfection, which I sometimes find unnatural (but not unimportant). My work is like a diary that transforms – it begins as autobiographical and gradually becomes something new.
