Centre for Romanian Studies

Son and grandson of moving shepherds…

in a biographical and reflexive quest, I was taken to look into a task that was the one of my father’s and my grandfather’s but will never be mine. My photographic quest draws its sources from a history of lines, of features, limits, traces, that constitute and mark a territory. It also finds roots in the ancient culture but in a very fragile way of the pastoral civilization.
In the beginning, there is the course where the line of the family roots stretches out between the alpine province and the Piémont mountains. The path (or rather paths) of the migratory shepherd, the trip that for centuries was brought twice a year by men and herds over the lands.
Shifts of altitude by the ones and shifts of attitude by my shepherd father to draw a line on this nomad life.
My artistic path, my photographer’s itinerary has been continually questionning the pastoral culture of the migration around the mediterranean area and even farther, ever since I was conscious of the fracture by my rejected inheritance.
It is not a simple quest for roots ( of which nomads don’t feel concerned ) but a semi-etnographic exploration of the mentioned event vanishing little by little : The trace of the pastoral routes, the mediterranean and african shepherd’s world.

Mon cheminement artistique mon itinérance de photographe n’a pas eu de cesse, dès lors que j’ai pris conscience de cette cassure (de cet héritage refusé) d’interroger l’épaisseur de cette culture pastorale de la transhumance, que ce soit en Europe ou en Afrique. Il ne s’agit pas d’une banale quête de racines (dont les nomades ne s’embarrassent pas), mais plutôt d’une exploration de ce qui se transforme peu à peu : la trace des trajets pastoraux, le monde des bergers.

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