I went to the Athos mountain with a commission for a documentary work about Monastery San Andreas. From the boat, Athos appeared to me like an island.
I was entering a place protected from the world, without electricity, without radio nor newspapers. A place out of time, or, better, with its own time: the clocks,
from a monastery to the other don't tell the same time and anyway told, for me, a perfectly unpredictable hour.

I thought that the main activity of the monks had been, forever, to stop time. Fasting, they were burning their bodies to reach the ideal state where I found the
inhabitants of San Andreas, to be spirits only, cut themselves from the world.

I could not suscribe to this philosophy. My system of work was not relevant here. I was alone, I had no points of reference anymore.

I did not work in a documentary way. I followed the spirit of places, waking early, going to bed early, spending my days reading, walking, watching a lot, taking
very few pictures: the earth, the sea, the sky, the cypresses, a few buildings; blue, green, red and white photographs.

The first pictures were of skulls, then of cypresses, the trees of death.

By accepting the rythm and the life conditions of Athos, but looking from a different point of view at nature and the elements, I stayed away from mysticism.

I was no more in a separated place but in the world.


jls, 1994