"Hotel Medea - Limited Edition of 6" Photograph

I am Christophe Van De Walle, photographer of abandoned locations.

Urban Exploration, that's what I do. Visiting and recording a small piece of history of abandoned, or rather, forbidden locations ...

For years I have been walking through abandoned buildings, simply because it gives me satisfaction. A certain feeling that you can not describe. You have to experience that. The transience, the silence, the decay, the fright of certain ambient sounds that break the silence and give you goose bumps. The adrenalin that rages through your body when you have succeeded in finding an entrance, because we do not break in. We visit ... in a broad sense of the word. That we have to brave a fence for that, or crawl through a cellar, we don’t care about that. Even security does not stop us from constantly seeking this feeling.

We must realize that people leave history behind the walls of all abandoned buildings. Sometimes buildings are left behind with the whole interior intact and then you imagine yourself really dozens of years back. Then suddenly you are faced with a calendar that has been torn off on a date somewhere in 1966 ... and it is still hanging on the wall patiently.

That is perhaps the best example to describe the atmosphere that I experience during my trips. A calendar that stops in 1966, and there you stand for a while in 2019 . then you start thinking ...

It took some years before I realized that I had to record this history. Capture for anyone who does not realize what has happened behind those walls. And with that, impermanence comes First