Walking in Circles
A great city is the greatest of dung heaps. Using the city to fertilize the countryside would be a certain profit. If our gold is manure, then our manure is gold. What is done with that golden manure? It is swept up and thrown into the sewer. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
This series is a visual diary of a full journey around a planet marked by circles of cast iron, repeating like a secret language, street after street, city after city.
A meditation on what flows below: the entrances to a labyrinth of sewers, of intestines. To the system that digests what is useless, what is left over. The remnants of matter, memory, water, money, time.
I remember, as a child, I had to clean the water well in my house. Open the lid and go down. Remove the mud, the insects, touch fear and darkness. Over time it turned into something else: the opening to a silent refuge. Planetary circles where underground lives dwell.
To walk looking downward is to keep asking myself what cities hide, what they drag along, what they silence.
365 photographs
