Saint-Barthélemy

Saint Barthélemy, a small village at the top of the mountain, and then the meadows, the paths, the stars. Nothing has changed up here, everything seems to be covered by a light layer of unreality.

This project is an ongoing photo essay that tells of my return to Lignan after more than twenty years of absence. It marks the beginning of a very personal project related to memories, the relationship between humans and animals, the sky, and the stars.

Fantasy, wrote Gianni Celati, is not something subjective: fantasy is a collective memory. When we fantasize, we enter an unknown land, submerged in a remote time, and draw from a common past that alters our perception of the world. Saint-Barthélemy is part of that memory; we sink into it when we reach the summit, when we leave the world behind. It is then that our eyes no longer see reality but reinterpret it in the light of something that is no longer there but remains within us. Whether we want it or not, up there we are seized by memories, and if - as Vico said - memory is the same as fantasy, we are captured by fantasy.

Saint-Barthélemy is the valley, the village is called Lignan: twenty inhabitants in total, meadows as far as the eye can see, paths and stars, so many and so close that they decided to build an astronomical observatory. I used to visit it with my uncle when I was a child, and he explained to me what planets, the solar system, and galaxies were. The protagonists of this story are all its inhabitants, their lives, their relationship with an unchanged territory, as if the world, in its frantic urge for change, had forgotten about them. Here, everything is the same, just a bit older, or perhaps covered by a light layer of unreality.

A world on the border between reality and fantasy, a cradle that protects and nourishes us.