Passim Perception

Years ago, while hiking in Majorca, I came across an enormous cliff face with cypress trees jutting out from the rock. I pulled out my camera to photograph it, but the image didn’t come close to what I was seeing. My own vision seemed to exaggerate certain parts of the landscape, pulling some elements forward while allowing others to recede.

The discrepancy made me aware that the camera and I were constructing the same landscape differently. Where the photograph flattened the scene into a fixed perspectival organization, perception seemed far less stable. Certain points sharpened, enlarged or advanced within my field of vision according to attention rather than simply their geographic distance. Passim, Latin for “everywhere,” describes this condition: a shifting constellation of focal and peripheral points distributed throughout the scene.

Linear perspective assumes that things diminish predictably with distance, but perception does not always behave so obediently. A distant tree can suddenly become enormous because attention pulls it forward. Near and far begin to compete rather than arrange themselves neatly along a perspectival axis. Passim explores this unstable depth, where space is organized not only by geometry, but by the movements of perception itself.