Pazea Sovni

Influenced by Belgian cinema and its dark poetry, oscillating between burlesque fiction and social documentary, I paint a subjective portrait of a territory, that of my childhood.

You can't choose the landscape of your youth. Dependent on adults, you grow up where they live. My family lived in Wallonia, Belgium, between Namur and Liège, on either side of the Meuse.

In the car, on the bus, on the train, I'd watch the landscape melt into speed. I was hypnotized by the incessant scrolling of images. I'd get addicted to the sight of this endless tracking shot, that of my own road-movie. I projected onto it my fantasies of another life, one that would have been set against these countless ephemeral backdrops. Condemned to disappear immediately, each snapshot offered me another possible world. I was always disappointed when I arrived, when I left the world of the window.

For seven years now, I've been returning regularly to this region. I've broken the window of the car, the bus and the train, to throw myself wholeheartedly into the landscape. On foot, I can pause my old film as often as I like and indulge my curiosity. I go in search of a vanished world, that of the memories of my youth. I track down its traces, unearth its relics. In the places that inspired me so much back then, characters appear, stories take shape. The grey everyday life of a region marked by the vestiges of industrialization seems to me to be the source of a disturbing strangeness: something else is going on. Influenced by Belgian cinema and its dark poetry, oscillating between burlesque fiction and social documentary, I paint a subjective portrait of a territory, my own.

Pazea: Walloon word meaning path through woods and fields

Sovni: Walloon word for souvenir; object that recalls a place or person