The poetry of elsewhere : zigzaging in the East…
This wandering in the east, zigzagging from north to south, took me from Riga in Latvia (December 1999) to Vilkovo on the Danube delta, in the Ukraine (March 2010). No linearity on this trajectory within an in-between space, between east and west. In 1999, in the Baltic countries, I was feeling elsewhere, culturally, visually. In 2010, this perception of elsewhere has changed and reflects a deeper understanding of the cultural, social, political complexity of these countries. It moved towards other countries, such as the Ukraine and Belarus, or even regions like the Karpathians or Danube delta, in Bessarabia.
Encounters with ghosts
Riga, December 1999, shadows are moving on the snow, coming from nowhere. Ghosts of today appearing and disappearing. Almost no faces. At a corner of the old town, on a snowy Saturday morning, an old man appears suddenly. He stares at me, smiles and talks to me in what I guess to be Russian. Then he asks me: “Synagogue”? I accept and follow him. We go into the synagogue, small, light. I go to the back of the room. Not really feeling at ease, I take a few photos and slip away. Some years later, in Lviv, mid winter, a gypsy woman lays in the mud, ignored and insulted
Why do I connect those two events? Ghosts of yesterday and today? The ghosts emerged progressively as recurrent and visually strong actors. My initial intention was not ghost hunting: they came to me, and became essential until they constituted the narrative thread of these zigzags. In these Eastern borderlands, I perceived their presence and met the absent, missing, eliminated, displaced, absorbed, marginalised ones. Impossible to ignore those many absent ones, as well as the living ones who pass without being seen. Several stories cross each other, in this ghost story: . life stories of the present: mine, of those who I met, of the places I passed through; . life stories of the past: of absent people who take us back to yesterday or before yesterday. Slowly ghosts pass, time passes by, distances pass. And me, like a ghost, I pass and disappear. It is a work on “passing” or “passage”.
