Scrublands

• Prize
• Photographer
  Antoine Bruy, France
• Studio
  Antoine Bruy
• Website
  www.antoinebruy.com

From 2010 to 2013, I hitchhiked throughout Europe with the
aim to meet men and women who made the radical choice to
live away from cities, willing to abandon their lifestyle based on
performance, efficiency and consumption.

Without any fixed route, driven by encounters and chance, this
trip eventually became for me a similar kind of initiatory quest
to those of these families. The experiments shown here display
various fates which I think should not only be seen at a political
level, but more importantly as daily and immediate experiences.

The heterogeneity of places and situations shows us the
beautiful paradox of the pursuit of an utopia through
permanent empirical attempts and sometimes errors. Unstable
structures, recovered materials, or multiple applications of
agricultural theories allow us to see the variety of human
trajectories. All of which aiming at developing strategies to gain
greater energy, food, economic or social autonomy.

These are in some way spontaneous responses to the societies
these men and women left behind. Therefore their land is
exploited but never submitted, the time has lost his tight
linearity to become a slow and deliberate pace. No more clock
ticking but the ballet of days and nights, seasons and lunar
cycles.