The Study of Solitude. — Vincent Bousserez

The Study of Solitude.

"The impulse to create often begins, frighteningly, in a tunnel of silence," wrote Adrienne Rich.
This artistic creation was born from a deep necessity for Vincent Bousserez—a need to lose himself, alone, far from everything, at the heart of the purest and most remote Nature.
To confront himself at the same time.
To reach, with his fingertips, the feeling of Solitude.
"It is healthy for a human being to stand alone in the hollow of the night; he then merges with the silence and feels a kinship that can, however, instantly turn into a painful solitude," writes Jón Kalman Stefánsson in Between Heaven and Earth.

2018.

Drawn to the Far North for years, I felt a deep urge: to return.

But I didn’t want to simply bring back souvenir images.
This time, I wanted to experience a true, tangible loss of bearings—to lose myself completely.

To achieve this, it was necessary to plan a journey under conditions extreme enough to provoke a kind of hallucination.

I organized a short expedition—only 36 hours. A round trip into a deserted zone, hundreds of kilometers from any human presence, within the Arctic Circle.
At the heart of the journey: a sleepless night, alone, in a surreal landscape, constrained by the narrow beam of my headlamp, like the monocular gaze of a Cyclops.

Departure from Paris at dawn.
A first flight to Finland’s capital.
A second to the extreme northeast of the country.
Nightfall.
A hundred kilometers of frozen tracks by 4x4.
A three-hour snowshoe trek to a place where no one had ever spent the night.
A sleepless night in the heart of a forest literally frozen by -30°C temperatures, wind, and frequent snowstorms.
A real danger, a real solitude—temporary, yet absolute—for the sake of pure creation.

Frozen dreams.

Monoliths.