Alessia Gunawan

Ride or Die begins from a specific moment, place, and relationship. It wasn’t built around a fixed narrative, but as a way of moving through a landscape and trying to read it. At some point it became clear that presence alone wasn’t enough. The space only opened through roleplay, through gestures, costumes, and characters used almost as tools. Though we are not American, our visual language is shaped by American culture: the road, the desert, the outlaw couple, the motel, the idea of escape. These are not neutral images but codes circulating through media and feeding back into culture. In this series of images, these codes are activated rather than illustrated. They shift how we move, behave, and see. A simple element like a mask or a posture can alter the scene, redirecting both the image and the bodies within it. The project is less about storytelling than about how these codes act on us. It looks at how they structure perception, intimacy, and action, and how, through staging and repetition, they can be disrupted. The work unfolds as a loop: the landscape is first used as a stage, then begins to mirror what is projected onto it, gradually taking on the role of a character itself. Road signs, fragments, and passing messages start to read as signals contributing to a gradual mystification of the space. Ride or Die operates in that tension, where projection meets reality, and where a place or a body begins to slip into something else.