“If you want to know where you are going, then look at where you come from”, goes the African proverb.
“Miverina” means “to come back”.
These images speak of my return to the country of my roots, Madagascar, back over on the other side of the world.
It was bound to happen one day, after 20 years of absence. I was bound to feel the desire to go back one day. Like an obsession to rediscover what I had forgotten, and confront my imagination with a country – a real living nation.
I was bound to feel the desire to reinvent an identity after so all the years of diasporic existence.
These images are the result of my wanderings and meetings on “Grande Ile”. I have tried to show something of my intimate relationship with this country, the Malagasies, their daily life and the rhythms of their existence.
Yet these images also speak of distance. They show violence in my incapacity to be totally assimilated to this Ancestral Land, and violence in the idea of being a resolute foreigner in my native country.
Photography is my pretext for learning again and understanding what it is to be Malagasy.
Madagascar, 2004 - 2009.
