Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise proposes an infinite regress: however swiftly Achilles runs, he must first reach the point where the tortoise began, and by then the tortoise has moved on — progress perpetually deferring its own arrival. It is a fitting emblem for the condition this project sets out to diagnose. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Martins had grown increasingly convinced that photography had reached its own version of this impasse: image-making had become so thoroughly aligned with technocapitalist logic — the latest lens, the latest body, the latest application, the latest operating system — that the pursuit of optimisation had quietly displaced the act of creation itself. The upgrade was always imminent; the image, perpetually deferred.

Compounding this was a well-documented neurological phenomenon: that an abundance of choice, rather than liberating the decision-maker, tends to paralyse them. Offered everything, we choose nothing. The limitless possibility that digital tools promised had become, increasingly, a form of creative foreclosure.

The Covid-19 pandemic introduced something the medium had ceased to generate on its own: genuine constraint. Working from his analogue darkroom, Martins began gathering the expendable residue of his own printing process — test prints, contact sheets, darkroom masks, offcuts and incidental supplies accumulated over twenty years — materials that would ordinarily be discarded without ceremony, here salvaged, layered, and allowed to resonate.

This earlier version of the project, however, takes on a deliberately dialectical structure, holding these collages in tension with a wholly different body of work: photographs taken at rush hour — early morning or late afternoon — from the upper floors of buildings Martins inhabited across China during three distinct disease outbreaks spanning twelve years: H1N1, SARS and Covid-19. Where the collages are intimate, palimpsestic, and liberated from circumstance, these landscapes are shaped entirely by it — by citywide lockdowns, restricted movement, and severely limited access to materials. Cities built for millions, arrested mid-motion — as if Achilles himself had finally stopped running, and found only silence at the finish line.

Placed together, the two bodies of work generate something that belongs to neither — a charge that lives in the interval between them, unnamed but unmistakable.