After having shared the lives of the inhabitants of Christiana, the autonomous community of Copenhagen, I hit the road further North towards the Arctic Circle, far from the noise, the communities – just long enough to take in all I had to remember of my experience in a free town.
With no other guidance than the wish to go back to the origins of a family name – mine – of which I know nothing, save for its Viking sonorities, I roamed from towns to shores, shores to lakes, lakes to islands, until I reached the North Cape.
At the mercy of opportunities, thunderstorms, and solitude’s biddings, I walked in Swedish forests, on Norwegian tundras, and in Finnish marshes. Sleeping outdoors most of the time, basking in a day that never ends, that follows you into your dreams, I came back with this corpus of images, eight weeks later
This is a journey I embarked on with disarrayed senses – free from what Copenhagen had offered me, quickly forgetful of Paris – in order to speak to the four elements: air, water, earth and fire fundamentally ; but also, maybe, to spit in the face of death, wherever she be hiding, that is up North, behind the horizon, doing what one does during walks towards lands that have an end.
This was a cradle awaiting me, I could vaguely sense it: out there, there were fathers, intimate geographies which knew my name, and even if this wasn’t mutual, I went towards them as one goes towards oneself, hoping for human questions in return, answers made of air, earth, land and fire. A happy journey, overall, happy of the melancholia of having come back “to the beginning”, and if ever I took the wrong path, it doesn’t matter: there, I was alone, alone with the Gods of the North; I walked towards them, facing their children, my brothers : facing the Boreal wind and the wails of the Arctic.
This was a journey to the end of the day, a conversation with those who were there before me, an embrace, a cry perhaps, a reunion after a long absence, a long absence in Septentrional land.
