Welcome to my world
Step right through the door
Leave your tranquillisers at home
You don’t need them anymore
This is the image that opens the new site. A solitary cinema standing alone at the end of a long pier in Yantai. “孤独的影院” – the Lonely Cinema. Part of the Phoenix Global Public Art Project, it screens short films for whoever happens to walk past while the sea moves around it. Modest, slightly peculiar, yet built to withstand the wind.
It is the closest visual equivalent I have found for what andrasikladi.com is. Not a portfolio or a pitch. A live archive. The near-complete record of my work, presented in full sequence and context. The place where my “paper movies” finally get screened without interruption. Visitors move between bodies of work as in a gallery, at their own pace, in their own sequence, making their own connections between images and ideas. Weaving their own narratives.
Why Build a Theatre at the End of a Pier?
…or why bother when Instagram exists, and attention does not?
Dr Grant Scott has been chewing on this question for years on their A Photographic Life podcast, and with particular urgency this year. In his February article “Joining The Dots,” Scott laid it out plainly: “A website is essential if you want to be taken seriously. It’s a shop window for your work that you control and a central hub for your practice.” And then the sharper edge: “If you are only using Instagram, you’re making a mistake.”
He is right. Instagram strips all context, both of the work and the conditions that allow it to be read. A single image on a feed is a sentence ripped from a novel. It may be a good sentence. It cannot carry the argument of the book.
Social media has its utility as a signpost, a way to say this exists, come see the rest. But the rest needs to exist somewhere you control. After watching the trailer, the movie has to be presented somewhere, with the pacing, the scale, the sequencing, and the context that the editing process was designed to produce. My website aims to be the theatre itself.
Against the Feed
What Grant described as “the visual soup that takes hours of doom scrolling to unpick” is the core problem for anyone working in longer form. My practice is built on bodies of work. Individual images serve as scaffolding, as entry points, but the meaning lives in the pairing, the sequencing, the pacing between images. What I call in a new essay I wrote for a journal, “the middle, that cannot be photographed.” The meaning that emerges when two photographs sit next to each other, and with enough attention, they generate something neither contains alone. This is where the work happens. Instagram cannot do this.
The Curatorial Act of Putting It All in One Place
Building this site forced a kind of reckoning. Assembling almost everything in one location is itself an editorial act. Deciding what belongs, how projects relate to each other, and what narratives I aim to weave for the audience to decipher.
From a curatorial standpoint, this is elementary. No gallery would hang work without considering the sequence, the spacing, and the relationship between pieces on adjacent walls. What the website offers, and what I have tried to build, is this experience.
An Open Door
The site is live. In the end, a website is not a promotional tool. It is an act of respect towards the work, the practice and ultimately, the medium of photography. It says: this is what I have made, and I have taken the time to present it as it was meant to be seen.