For me, travelling does not mean going far away.
It means shifting the point from which I look at things.
An unfamiliar street, an almost empty station, a voice heard in a market, a window lit at night: it is often through such small details that a place begins to enter us.
Travel is not about escaping from one’s life, but about encountering it outside the place where we are used to recognizing it.
When we walk, we become more receptive. We look more closely. We speak to people we might never have met in our everyday lives. We accept not knowing exactly where we are, having to ask, having to wait, sometimes even getting lost.
And that is when geography stops being merely a map.
In a video I made, Under the Same Sky — We Have the Same Future, I brought together places that seem geographically distant from one another, yet remain connected by the same sky. Beneath it, human beings have drawn borders and built barriers. The sky, however, has none.
The places we pass through begin to mingle with our memories, our absences, the questions we were carrying with us without even knowing it.
Perhaps this is what I am looking for whenever I leave: not another place in which to live, but another way of looking at the place I come from.
Because every journey, in the end, crosses two territories.
The one before our eyes.
And the one we carry within us.
