We all leave something behind.
Even when we try to travel carefully, even when we believe we have done everything possible to avoid producing waste, we still leave traces.
We pollute by moving. We pollute by consuming. We pollute through the objects we carry, use and eventually discard.
Even walking is not innocent. The soft plastic soles of my shoes slowly wear away with every step. During my journey through Iceland, I completely consumed two pairs of shoes. Their material became part of the landscape, particle by particle, without me ever being able to see exactly where it went.
This map records another kind of trace.
While walking, I began collecting the rubbish I encountered along the way. Some objects had fallen from cars. Some had escaped from their owners. Others had simply been forgotten. A bottle, a piece of packaging, a fragment of plastic, an anonymous object lying among rocks, moss and lava. Walking makes these things visible.
Because we move slowly, we have time to see what would normally disappear from our attention. An object can be noticed from a distance, approached, examined and located.
I began to record these encounters.
Each photograph is connected to a place. Each object has a coordinate. Each coordinate marks a moment in which something discarded became visible to me.
The map therefore does not only represent a landscape, it represents a series of interruptions within that landscape.
The objects I collected were temporarily removed from the places where I found them and carried with me. In doing so, I increased the weight of my own journey.
This was perhaps the only ethical gesture I could make.
I could not avoid producing waste. I could not undo the traces already left behind. I could only choose to carry some of them.
The weight of the rubbish became a physical weight added to my own body, to my walking, to my journey. A small burden I chose to assume.
The map is therefore also a record of what I carried.
Not only the objects themselves, but the knowledge of where they had been.
A collection of coordinates. A collection of photographs. A collection of small failures.
Mine, and ours. We are all in debt to the landscape.
Even when we walk lightly, something remains beneath our feet.