January 2001.
The beginning of a 14-month, life-changing journey through nine countries across Asia.
I was 27 years old, traveling and living fully in the present moment. I sketched every day.
I returned home with countless sketchbooks—and hundreds of rolls of film—because it was during this journey, wandering through Nepal, India, Myanmar, and many other countries, that I discovered photography.

This journey, the most intense period of freedom in my life, left such a profound mark on me that when I came back in March 2002, I found myself unable to dive into my photographs, my sketches, or my writings.
All my negatives ended up stored in the cellar, left there like deliberately buried memories, hidden deep within myself.

January 2019, seventeen years later.
At the bottom of my basement, fallen from a dusty shelf, I found an old canvas bag.

My heart raced. It was my great journey.

I began to examine my negatives, and what I discovered felt like a gift: attacked by humidity and mold, they had aged.
The images that emerged were strange—no longer anchored in the present, lost somewhere in an undatable past, reappearing freed from any notion of time or place.

What struck me most, as I rediscovered and worked through these images, was the sense of lightness and innocence that prevailed—mostly landscapes, whose exact geographic location no longer seemed to matter.
In each photograph, we are simply somewhere else, somewhere on Earth.

If this series speaks of the innocence of the young man I once was, crossing the world, it also speaks of another kind of innocence.

While developing this series in 2019, I realized that during the time of my journey, there was little talk about the destruction of biodiversity, the imbalance caused by humanity since the Industrial Revolution, and its consequences on the climate.

Today, in the age of information and advanced technologies, we are confronted daily with numbers that some scientists had already foreseen forty years ago.
We now live under the heavy weight of that knowledge—this undeniable, real guilt.
Every day, staggering figures about animal and plant species disappearing because of us.
Every day, news reports, social media posts, protests, movements, young people raising their voices—and rightfully so.
Every day, this proven, anchored guilt settles deeper into our lives.