At the beginning of October, in Alentejo, Portugal, the earth is still scorched by the sun and the heat of summer. Then, it begins to turn green again with intermittent or torrential rains. A new spring in the middle of autumn.
The first thing that strikes us when we arrive at the place is the powerful smell of the surrounding flora: labdanum is everywhere. Wild fennel too, which is more than 2 meters high. I feel that this place accepts human beings just as guests. Around me, few human constructions, it feels very good. Already, I am no longer the same person I was a few hours ago, when I was waiting for the plane in Geneva airport. Landscapes shape people's physiology. The landscape is not a place to contemplate whose visual contours have been delineated by the arbitrary size of a canvas. No, a landscape is made of smells, sounds, tastes that permeate our cells and our minds. It shapes and polishes us, like stones.
I walked a lot the first few days. On the trails, but also on narrow paths, drawn by wild boars, corresponding to their own needs and desires, lines of desire, as they say in urbanism. At the end of the day, there are so many sounds and smells, so many intensities lingering in the air that it doesn't give me the chance to think, I am a body that feels, a small provisional element in this age-old orchestration.
I like liminal spaces, where two things mix, become magical. Dusk in particular, and dawn, all marked by fog. The birds sing so loudly, they too feel the intensity. A feeling of danger, without imminent danger. A great mystery, about to be discovered, a suspense that never ends. How else to explain it?
There are also beings that die. A frog found inert in the pool, all swollen. A snail without a shell (crushed by mistake when closing my window) that fights for its survival. It fell out of the window and stretches its long neck in a last attempt to live, and suddenly turns gray, life is gone.
The other residents came here looking for a certain solitude, they work a lot. Sometimes I feel lonely so I go to the workshop and spread my solitude on the fabric, like crimson berries that I crush between my hands.
Do all these things that penetrate me also stay in me? And if you would open me up, what would you find there? A starry night where the sounds of the beasts fill all the space, hectares of labdanum and their resin that sticks to the fingers, a colony of snails, marble dust, the intensity that slips between my fingers. Will I also leave a mark on this landscape? Will this place remember me?
When I was a child, my father bought encyclopedias on the human body. One of them illustrated the different systems that make up our body in several transparent, superimposable pages. The body covered in its skin, then the vital organs, the nervous and vascular system. The body was represented as a layered, planar projection of all its internal activities.
In the same way, I construct a planar, somatic and psychological projection. A space of layers, Rorschach identities, whose in-between, liminal spaces are discovered. I travel inside myself, a subtle and cosmic body, an unprecedented floating without beginning or end.
