In January 2019, I was busy doing time at the broken-hearted club, walking through life in a sort of existential exile from myself.

 

Coincidently, I was back in South Africa, working on a long term project, Tales To Entertain The Dead.

 

I was living in a flat downtown Johannesburg, with windows called “jours de souffrances“ for they had bars ( for security reasons), it felt like a cell.

 

And I believed I had time to do, jours de souffrances ahead of me, sins to purge.

 

I felt like a stranger to this world as I went through Dorps (small towns in South Africa). 

I was surrounded by sun, sand & solitude.

 

It seemed that entire towns were filled with jobless people, staring into the void all day long for lack of better things to do.

South Africa’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world. 

It is consistently measured above 20%.

 

THE ART OF BEING ALONE, then, started organically.

I was trying to capture the essence of isolation, a landscape of a mind trapped in solitude.

 

But then it hit me in the face, solitude and anonymity, when chosen, is also a blessing, maybe even a luxury, a poetic gesture, in a world where our every move is recorded.

 

The technology revolution and our obsession to be “likable“ and liked at all cost in the virtual world of social media feels like an alienation.

 

THE ART OF BEING ALONE is, then, a celebration of men’s individuality and a belief in personal freedom.

 

An index of the forces at work against a generic world.