Waste Lands

The waste land is a devastated land, exhausted by over-exploitation of the soil and marked by desolation. There is not a living soul in this land, apart from a few stray animals, wandering spectres of a post-apocalyptic era. The waste land is also the ravaged body and mind of the worker who fell sick and became a wandering spectre in search of a new soul to rise from the ashes. Borrowing the title and spirit of T. S. Eliot's famous poem The Waste Land, the photographs of this series were taken between 2021 and 2023 around my home in the Province of Hainaut (Belgium), during a prolonged period of sick leave following a devastating burn out... 'the illness of the century' as it is known. A century... it is precisely what separates us from Eliot's poem published in 1922, in which the poet denounced the failings of modernity. The ghostly landscapes in this series are like voices that mark, not the presence, but the rustle of an erasure, voices that speak of a place inside all losses, a place made of mists, silences and doubts. A place where language can no longer instill faith, but where the creative act and its images ritualize loss and perhaps give us a glimpse of a new light.