The Journey of Asterion

For four months, I followed a fighting bull until his death in the arena. Through photographs and his imagined diary, The Journey of Asterion tells the last days of an animal raised for one purpose: to die in the ring.

For four months, I followed a fighting bull until his death in the arena. Every week I went to his manade to feed him, observe him, and come to know his world.

Through writing and photography, The Journey of Asterion tells the last months in the life of an animal raised for a single purpose: death in the arena.

The project unfolds in two parts that constantly speak to each other: the bull’s intimate diary, a kind of autofiction in which the animal himself recounts his final days, and a photographic part that portrays his daily life. All the images were taken in the Camargue, near the ganadería where Asterion was born and raised.

The photographs move with the text and its inner rhythms, following the bull on his journey toward the arena. They start in the light and slowly sink into a mysterious world of streams, rain, and underground waters. Lost in a bright, still, indifferent nature, inhabited only by abandoned carcasses and silent landscapes, Asterion waits for his end.

Drawing on García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, I built the project as the slow and inexorable descent toward death of an animal who cannot change his future or his fate, only accept it in all its radicality.

Conceived and made with Doriane Bellet, the artist’s book is a box set limited to 100 copies. It contains two books, the photobook and the bull’s diary, along with a leporello of archival photographs, all bound and sewn by hand.

The project was exhibited at the Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, as part of the group exhibition Sur la frontière du temps. Une relève méditerranéenne and at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2024.