Scrublands

Since 2010, I travelled throughout Europe to meet men and women who made the radical choice to live away from cities, rejecting a lifestyle based on consumption and the material measurement of performance and efficiency. 

Without a fixed route and led by chance encounters, my journey simulated the quest of these families. The people and the places depicted in my images need to be understood not only in terms of the politics they represent but also through their immediate daily experiences.

The diversity of the places and situations bring out the contradictions in the pursuit of a utopia. Unstable structures, recycled materials and the application of a multiplicity of agricultural theories bring out the plurality of human trajectories, all aimed at gaining greater energy, food, economic and social autonomy. 

In some ways these are spontaneous responses to the societies these men and women have left behind. Their land is exploited, but never left fallow. Time moves at a slow and deliberate pace, with the clock ticking to the ballet of days and nights and seasons and lunar cycles.

All my photographic work is structured around questioning the place of man in his environment, or as Johann Van der Keuken wrote, “it is not to show that here is this or that. This is to show how it is, how it is to be in a given place”. People’s relationship to privacy, to their physical environment and finally to the economic and intellectual conditions that determine them have nourished all of my production.