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Almost twenty years ago, my cousin chose to live her life as free as possible. She lives in a van for most of the year and earns her living as a freelance shepherd in the French mountains. Our lives couldn’t be more apart, and yet I find myself closely connected to her.
Like her, I have always felt that the system of neo-liberal society doesn’t suit me – its emphasis on materialism and self-realisation, its way of commercializing practically everything, its blindness for everything outside itself. My cousin radically broke away from it, I half-heartedly stayed. But I found another, less brutal escape: photography.

Does it make sense to pursue happiness in a world without other human beings? What does freedom really mean – as a concept, as something we all seem to aspire? Can loneliness, poverty, or time be any different when experienced on a mountaintop?

I have been photographing my cousin since 2017. Every visit, my perspective changes. La cigale et la fourmi, which lends its title from a famous fable by Jean LaFontaine about a singing grasshopper and a hard-working ant, is a long-term photography/text project containing a vortex of ideas. It is about the collision of our personal lives and western society, about commitment, feasibility and the need to connect - to others, and to a world that seems increasingly incomprehensible.

La cigale et la fourmi is a work in progress.