Mountains

Mountains
2009-2010

John Ford once said that one has to learn how to film mountains before filming humans; later I prescribed myself: “know your mountains, learn your mountains, walk your mountains.”

I grew up surrounded by mountains but I couldn't walk them, they were too far away from me. I had to content myself to watch them from the port. The slopes of my mountains were splashed with seafoam; and there they stood, stubborn, like the towers of a castle, sometimes hiding themselves between the clouds, or barely visible in the morning mist, almost transparent, as if they wanted me to see beyond them. That was the horizon of my sea, so different from the nothingness of the ocean.

Years later, when I left the sea, and I was living in a swamp—London is in a swamp—, and there were no mountains to look up at, and images came from memory, I longed for those mountains, which I never really knew; and I began to climb them with the only tools available to me, with the camera and the computer; I would have liked to paint them like Cézanne if they had been within walking distance, but I knitted them instead with the machine. My mountains were nothing like Sainte-Victoire, on one side, the view was slightly cooler and there wasn’t anything in particular to depict, actually I wasn’t depicting them; but wasn’t in a hurry to reach the top, nor was I looking for the view from the peak, or any view; I wanted to explore them first, get to know them, walk them; and in what spirit were they climbed?

30 November 2025