The distance in everything, the everything in me.

“…loneliness isn’t only to live alone, loneliness is being unable to keep company to someone or something that is within us, loneliness is not a tree alone in the middle of a flat land, is the distance between the deep sap and the bask, between the leaf and the root…” (José Saramago, in The year of the death of Ricardo Reis)

Before settling in Cambodia for the last year I spent one and half years hitchhiking all around Southeast Asia. After more than 18.000 kilometers spent in random vehicles of kind strangers, I got myself thinking about the blurred line between being a traveler and being a vagabond. There’s no doubt that a tourist goes away to relax or be entertained, while a traveler goes to learn and experience new cultures. But I started to realize that my primary motif wasn’t that, coming to the conclusion of my own vagabondness: someone who goes away to come back different.

Traveling as a self-transformative tool is probably nothing new, but is indeed something that has to be experienced anew by every single aspiring adventurer. But that consists not only in a collection of instagram-ready experiences to be shared, being solo traveling a more nuanced and complex process between two opposite poles. The excitement of seeing new things and the amount of hours one spends by him or herself. The discoveries along the road and the solitude in me. The world and the self, a never ending cycle of influences and collaborative growth.

Solitude as a method for better understanding what surround us, the space and time to digest experiences and shorten the distance between our way of seeing the world and the alternative ways we learn every day while away from home. Closing the gap between us and others, between us and ourselves. In the end, being closer to what we are by taking everything in, finding our place in the world by writing the world in us.

In the other hand, the act of traveling almost transform us into a character, being our journey of transformation as the narrative arc of a character in any of the novels in these shelves around. As famously said by the german philosopher (and great writer) Friedrich Nietzsche, our life as literature: we should create ourselves as a work of art. In this case, traveling has as much potentiality as a novel’s plot, with its experiences and encounters, to shape our character and invent new ways of being, new chapters in our own existence. An inspiring person we meet on the street market, a moment of realization while walking on a new village, a bumpy but pleasant ride in a back of a truck. That’s why is so crucial to take a creative glance at everything along the road, the world as a pure aesthetic experience, a poem without a poet. Our role is to unfold stories in every person or place, writing our own subjectivity in everything around us — for everything to write back at us.

Traveling is storytelling, and always has our self as its primary destination.

(exhibition composed by photography, an installation made by small pictures forming the word ‘vagabond’, texts and poetry distributed to the audience)