21 196 (2010)

“All our activities are linked to the idea of journeys. And I like to think that our brains have an information system giving us orders for the road, and that here lie the mainsprings of our restlessness. At an early stage man found he could spill out all this information in one go, by tampering with the chemistry of the brain. He could fly off on an illusory journey or an imaginary ascent. Consequently settlers naïvely identified God with the vine, hashish or a hallucinatory mushroom, but true wanderers rarely fell prey to this illusion. Drugs are vehicles for people who have forgotten to walk.” (Bruce Chatwin)

This body of work is about a 3-month, 21 196 kilometres long journey through the Australian continent. It attempts to capture the ephemerality and authenticity of a personal experience by showing the in between places, which are usually neglected in favour of the interesting and important ones. Although I had a personal interest in places with particular splendour, photographically it was not significant which sights I would encounter on the way, as I wanted my images to be about the experience of journeying.

The piece talks about how our perception of spaces and places is influenced by our respective cultural knowledge. Unavoidably, realising that my own perspective of the land is formed by my European cultural background, the composition of my landscape photographs remind us of the romanticism of the Arcadian ideal. I decided it would be presumptuous to break with those traditions, so rather obeyed them but at the same time analysed them critically.

I used the notion of paths to reflect upon the Western concept of navigating through the land which contradicts the indigenous perspective of nature.

The images of paths and roads are intended to function as metaphors for the physical travelling experience. They also stand for my personal intellectual journey and therefore depict landscapes devoid of human presence.

The work is also about the lure of the wilderness and our inherent restlessness. Reading Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild while on the journey helped me reflect on questions like: Why do we want to wander? Why do we need to wander?