claude marthaler yak yakman

SLIDE-SHOW C O N T E N T S The planet is so beautifull and fragile in a bike’s eye, memory so porous, a camera and the language so imperfect that I am trembling at the idea to betray the world in its diversity and essence. The 600 images of my slide-show reveal above all my emotions of my long roaming through Eurasia, the Americas and Africa. They weight much more than my 80 kgs heavy yak. It is with slowness, eroding the weight of exotism and ideology, crossing the borders that I measured the Earth’ puls, like a sensual seismograph. But once coming back, what remains from such a journey ? Fragments of road, riding like mad, friendships or love-stories,

unbelievable human ones, sad or joyfull, strange. From a frozen winter in Kirghizstan to the 5 000 m high passes of Tibet, from the Taklamakan desert to the bolivian Altiplano, from the equatorial jungle of Congo to the Atlas ranges of Morroco, landscapes and meetings have lost any kind of chronology to create a kaleidoscope, as in a dream. There are this indescribable instants which at the very end of a long road are worth eternity, the hazard in which I can no more believe, this energy that I took sometimes from I don’t know where, the magic line that I still listen resounding on the earth’s face, like a geopoetical micro groove. It is at this journey that I invite you ; like Hindus like to say: «What is not given is lost».