The Space Between Us

I remember being eight or nine years old, sitting quietly in a neighborhood beauty salon while my mother had her hair done. At some point, a woman began speaking—about what exactly, I no longer remember. What I remember clearly is the moment she broke down. She cried in front of a group of women she did not know. And without hesitation, they gathered around her. They held her. Comforted her. That moment has stayed with me ever since.

The Space Between Us is part of an ongoing, long-term body of work in which I explore how women and other vulnerable bodies experience, remember, and transform public space. This project focuses on beauty salons as one of the everyday environments where care, memory, and belonging are quietly produced.

Beauty salons—often dismissed as superficial or purely aesthetic—operate as informal spaces of refuge and collective care. While women have historically been assigned the role of universal caregivers, these spaces reveal moments in which care circulates horizontally, among peers. They are places where vulnerability is allowed, where stories surface, and where presence itself becomes a form of support.

Over time, these salons have also become spaces of freedom and transformation for other vulnerable communities, particularly LGBTQ+ and trans people. Within these interiors, bodies are allowed to exist, change, and be seen with acceptance. Though experiences differ, these communities share a common condition: navigating cities that were not designed with them in mind.

This proposal does not frame beauty salons as an isolated subject, but as one constellation within a broader investigation into how care, memory, and belonging are produced in everyday urban spaces. These salons reveal an invisible architecture—one shaped not by power or permanence, but by presence, vulnerability, and shared experience.

Why Is This Project Important?

Cities have largely been designed by and for men, privileging productivity, efficiency, and control. Emotional safety, care, and transformation are rarely acknowledged as essential components of urban life. Yet women and other vulnerable communities have always reshaped the city from within—through repetition, proximity, and shared rituals.

Beauty salons belong to this invisible architecture. They are spaces where care and freedom coexist, where bodies are not policed but welcomed, and where transformation—physical, emotional, symbolic—is possible. At a moment when conversations around gender, identity, and belonging are increasingly urgent, this project offers an intimate and grounded perspective on how cities are quietly humanized.

Why Me?

My background as both an architect and a documentary photographer shapes how I approach this work. I am interested not only in how spaces look, but in how they are lived, remembered, and emotionally inhabited. My long-term practice focuses on women, everyday life, and the relationship between bodies and the built environment.

Having photographed similar spaces and dynamics in Vietnam, Cuba, India, and Mexico, I recognize this not as a localized phenomenon, but as a recurring pattern across cultures. This project allows me to continue and deepen an investigation I have been developing over several years—bringing together memory, space, and care as central elements of urban life.

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