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The mind, it travels

 

A photographic documentary about migration,

about encounters through art, travelling, mutual

inspiration and the vastness of the sea.

How do we get to where we’re going?

I met artist Eddy De Buf in the hallways of Nucleo’s artist-house in 2015, when I moved into one of the co-working-spaces at Paddenhoek in Ghent. Not sharing the same space, always meeting while rushing from one place to the next, we connected on the move. Because he is the moving kind of person: a former sailor man, who has voyaged the seas for decades before he finally stranded in Belgium: a father-figure but of the funny kind.

        Talking about the plans for his latest work of art, the story took a turn. Words travelled and shaped the decision to go on a journey together. Joining forces, each following the compass of our passions and seeing where it will take us.

Because it was an inspiring image to see the old man work, I had started earlier to document the process of Eddy preparing the piece; I did not know anything about it back then.
It did not yet have the title it later carried around Europe: “In search of a new place and butterflies”. Three sculptures, copies of Eddy’s head (dimensions: 1mx1,5m) build to resemble a buoy were made to be released off the coast of Cornwall, UK. There, where the European Union and the spirit of diverse community it intended to install, just recently experienced it’s most crucial crisis ever since its foundation in the just recently torn European Union. Releasing the sculptures from Land’s End, its most westerly point, the art reaches out to create random encounters with their finders.

The selected pictures show the three final stages of the project: the travel; the search and the launch. They were shot with Leica M7 and a Pentax K1000 using Kodak Portra 400, JCH PAN 400 and Adox Silvermax 100. Black and white film was developed at home using a stand development method to give more contrast to the images.

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2020 © Meindert Peirens