Patagonia

by Michel Le Bris
Writer, philosopher, founder of the étonnant voyageur (astonishing traveler) Festival in St Malo
 
“(…) Treated animal skins, stone faces, eyes of wind and rain, pelted by a driving sea spray, shriveled by the cold, chilled to the bone, forced to execute each movement precisely in order to survive, forced to live outside, subject to the crushing law of reality in a too-wide world, with no need for other human beings - for the most paradoxical of experiences, the least communicable, having to fill these vast spaces with tales and legends and fantastic animals, bigger than life heroes, such that, where the “normal” passersby would see only grey, dismal landscapes, they move inside an intensely live space, both material and immaterial - a space for their dreams.
I like these photos by Grégoire Korganow so much, for this very reason. Indians, gauchos, sailors, they’re all part of the landscape, having shaped them, or having been shaped fictionally by them. So it is difficult to find the secret complicity between these faces, these glances -- and the outside world. How many stories have we seen evoking Patagonia with no one there? How many residents have been described in useless picturesque images? Here what moves me, as did Bruce Chatwin’s famous In Patagonia, where the writer shared with us the excesses of his multiple encounters more than his brief descriptions, is what I see on each page, where the beauty of the landscape is to be found in these faces, these eyes of wind and rain. Each time I returned to Saint-Malo, Coloane urged me to follow him there, to the end of the world, where he had left a part of himself. The most intimate part, the part he could not write in his books, because they are unspoken. “Come,” he would say, “It’ll be a gift.” A Breton understands this: what have we ever done differently, all of us, so close to reality, with the sounds of the wind and the rain, gnawing on the pebbles on the shore -- except to live in our dreams?”
 
Michel Le Bris
on "Patagonies, stories of the end of the world" published 2004