Simone Fürbringer

People's associations with flora goes back a long way, taking us back to our own roots as well as to new ways of life and creative potential that reveal themselves as we deal with plants.

From January to November 2004, as a kind of carnet de voyage alongside our other activities, we asked one and the same question of various people we met on our journeys, including friends: "Do you remember a moment in your life when something really changed?" We requested them to tell us a story to illustrate their reply, and we filmed them.

What story is hidden in the stranded suitcase full of pictures, sounds and letters whose origins we do not know? The film is an homage to cinema, a film poem made up of images between dream and reality; a network of sounds, text fragments and voices that leads far out into the world and at the same time close to us. Aren’t we all floating islands?

In May of 1982 Julio Cortázar, the Argentinean writer and his companion in life, Carol Dunlop set out in their VW bus on a journey along the highway from Paris to Marseille that, for each of them, was to be their final one. Twenty-five years later, Océane Madelaine and Jocelyn Bonnerave set out to undertake the journey again.

The path to Yusef Lateef was a journey into the unknown. We were aware that he is one of the great maestros of jazz and one of the last of his generation still alive. In an era of black culture that probably found its strongest form of expression in music, he was a contemporary and companion of those musicians who helped to shape and renew jazz: John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley. Now, at the age of 84, Yusef Lateef lives withdrawn in his house in the woods somewhere in New England – in a room full of musical instruments. He still plays his saxophone today, as he has done for most of his life. (Humbert & Penzel)

The highway, revisited. Years later. Transformation of a locale. A place of mobility that, in the meantime, has become a place of silence.

An African backyard, the stage of life. Rhythms rise up from everywhere, interweave with one another. It is a daily dance of gestures and sounds that has something eternal. The music of life is omnipresent and leads us to the heart of Africa.

Author and activist Milo Yellow Hair (Oglala Lakota) is one of the most important intellectual voices of the American Indian resistance movement. Born in 1950 and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation, he has dedicated himself to the struggle for the recognition and survival of indigenous cultures. We spent an afternoon asking him questions on the theme of memory and cultural identity. Memories are not what has passed, but are the cutting edge between past and present. Never before has so much information been saved and forgotten at the same time. What happens when we lose the memory of our heritage? Is it preserved in collective memory and made accessible in the challenges of the future?