Strangers like me
Silkscreen with piezography print on baryta paper 12cm x 15cm, handbound 34 pages
Journal portraying my 3 month hitchhiking journey through Europe, relying on kindness and cruelty of strangers. People are inherently kind and the first step towards realizing that is to trust our instincts and look beyond cruel and crippling self doubts.
(don't) Trust a stranger. That's a statement which I heard repeatedly from parents while growing up. What is trust? And why would one want to interact with a stranger to begin with? These are some of the questions which I hoped to answer hitchhiking across Europe for three months; relying only on the unconditional kindness and cruelty of strangers. There were a lot of firsts in this trip: the first time I felt homeless, first simultaneous acceptance and rejection, first time I found and donated a bicycle, first dog walk, first time someone bet on my presence or the first time someone gave me keys to an apartment; before disappearing into the night. The documented moments provide a glimpse of the times when I felt comfortable enough to make photographs and how these images contrast with my thoughts scribbled in journal(s).
I started the trip without any expectations and ended with a feeling of being alive. People are inherently kind and the first step towards realizing that is to trust our own instincts and look beyond the cruel and crippling self doubts. The current sense of xenophobia propagated by media has invariably tuned us towards skepticism; labeling anyone unknown as "the other". The realization that we're all dependent on the kindness and cruelty of each other would perhaps (one day) eliminate the need for walls or borders.
