Orient
The notion of the Orient refers first and foremost to the source of light, the place from which the dawn rises. The Oriental world is not a geographical space, but a cultural area, a phantasmatic projection shaped by the collective Western mentality, a concept into which everyone projects their imagination, arousing fascination and curiosity. Orient, Orients…
From the Balkans to the Far East, I went to meet its smells, its turbulent history, its shifting borders, its fractured territories and its crumpled populations. I met Kurds, Uighurs, Kosovo Albanians, Palestinians and Iraqis. As I travelled its sometimes dusty roads, discreetly blending in with day-trippers in a multitude of rickety vehicles, I sought to see and lose myself, for want of understanding. My footsteps have taken me to some of its remote corners: from Gora in southern Kosovo to the isolated valleys of the Hindu Kush, from Kurdistan to the Chinese Far West of Xinjiang, via the Pankissi valley on the border with Chechnya.
Travelling to listen to the noise of the world. A world at two speeds, oscillating between calm and effervescence, between presence and effacement, expressing and writing itself by revealing its materiality. And as always in travel, when the road has stripped you bare, rinsed you dry, there’s still the gentleness of encounters and the fragility of landscapes to blur the fatigue of the miles travelled.
