MENTAL EUROPE
INTRO
Widening the foundation, one brick at a time.
On the way
I just can’t figure out
is it too late or too early?
What is there to look at? Heavy clouds.
Heureusement, il fait toujours beau au-dessus des nuages.
THIS LIFE IS BRUTAL!
“(…) Let’s not rush to Zagreb though, because you would miss the story about ice-balls falling from the sky, destroying trees and flooding paths. You would also miss the part about thousands of slugs invading our tents, pots, shoes. It gave me the chance to realize how squeezable slugs can be, sneaking in the oddest places. And also, how much they shit. Given the fact that our campground was near a dam and it was pouring rain, some people did not feel 100% comfortable. Also, being under tall trees while thunder rumbles did not help neither, but it was too late to change location. Instead, we decided to start a fire. It worked! It was quite of a miracle – not a God-related miracle obviously, but a Tampax-and-newspaper kind of miracle.”
Read the full article here : https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2023/lljubljana-zagreb?lang=fr
Video by Galina T.
Music by Dominique Fils-Aimé
Montage by myself
THE FALL OF PATRIARCHY
Before the sailing trip, I was probably already depressed. High-functioning depression. I don’t think I had panic attacks though. If I did, I didn’t label it as such. I probably ignored it and carried on. After I came back to Europe, the one I had in Prague was the worst I experienced. It took me a while to calm down. They’re part of my life now. It feels alienating. Who’s this stranger? Have we met before? Not nice to meet you.
Deux grenouilles
STILL LIFE
I had not been there for ages.
This photo was taken last week by my partner Gala, in the same place we had visited two years ago, under very different circumstances. From that earlier trip, I remember barely anything but a panic attack in the main square and eating a snack by a construction site.
Times are changing. We are changing.
Nobody really talks about the moment when you start to feel better after a long depression. The horizon looks brighter, opportunities seem wider. And yet, anxiety kicks in. After being on pause for so long, I now have to decide what comes next.
What comes next?
13.11.2025
Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my return to France after my first journey to Iran. Tehran, its capital, is where my photo series began. Looking back, I realise that this city, and that moment in time, was the source of many of the deepest transformations in my life, the place where most of my personal construction sites first emerged. Many of the choices that shaped my path, including my move to Berlin, trace back to the aftermath of that trip.
This photograph was taken in Leipzig, where a friend I made in Iran settled last year. There is something special about now living in the same country, a country that belongs to neither of us, after meeting a decade ago on the other side of the world, in a place that marked the beginning of my metamorphosis. It feels as if life has completed one of its circles. I need such circles to feel whole, to sense that the people, places, and events in my life do not simply end, but continue to unfold. Everything is part of a spiralling, ongoing story.
Yesterday was also the day I received my new passport and ID card, now carrying my mother’s name alongside my father’s – something I had long intended to do. People go, break up, die, or simply move on, yet life keeps adding up. So two names instead of one. A chosen family alongside a shrinking one.
I think of identity as a house under perpetual construction : bricks are laid upon one another, each layer strengthening the rest. A mix of materials, colors, and designs, each addition contributing something singular, shaping the house into what it becomes over time. Additions, rather than replacements. And in the voids people sometimes leave, the wind feels cold at first, but eventually windows open.
I am all that has happened to me. I am what those I have met have contributed to shape. I am what I decide to make of all this.
I am the sky the scaffolding is reaching for.
He would have definitely taken this photo too.
Once upon a time
a foot.
mental metal 