Thierry Konarzewski

I have always had a weakness for used or damaged goods and a real fascination for the marks, the stigmata left by the passage of time.
What we call garbage has its own discrete and particular magic. Cans and plastic containers, everyday objects of no value, are treated as such by man and cast, lazily, unconsciously, without a backward glance, into the sea. Their journey through the waves is a heroic one. Tossed and shaken, impregnated with salt and heavy oil, all kinds of marine life clinging to their folds, bent, spindled, torn, exhausted, they fetch up on our coasts as filthy, inert flotsam. The untouchable. But through the subtle alchemy of their journey something unexpected has come to pass. They have become transformed into seafarers, wanderers, knights errant.
For the last five years, I myself have wandered and clambered around the coves and creeks of the Ile of San Pietro. Winter and summer I have met these castaways and they have told me their story. I have photographed the sliver of their soul. Useless containers held now in my frame, I have met here a real humanity, nobility, emotions of sadness and rage. This strange folk have brought me into the presence of deep, ancient, timeless time.
Of course they remain pieces of plastic, empty containers which clutter nature but whose meeting place and time I have faithfully recorded. They are the fruit of our actions, the mirror of our civilization as well as its memory, for they will survive us.