The Riverbed

In a remote mountainous area of south east Spain, multi-national, non-conformist individuals live out their versions of paradise in ephemeral, loosely bound communities. Unlike economic or political migrants coming into Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and other African and middle eastern countries, the people here have different objectives; choosing migration to facilitate an ideology, in an attempt to escape western society rather than join it.

In this landscape, distinct counter-cultural groups exist in hard to find places; along the banks of an infertile riverbed, in ravines and off mountain passes, in relative proximity to each other and in continual states of flux. People who reject and subvert the conventions of a structured democratic society from Europe, North and South America, Japan, and Australasia, gravitate to this area, making their temporal imprint on the land, local culture and atmosphere of place, through the environments they stage and occupy. Temporal encampments appear then disappear, to move elsewhere, or be abandoned or destroyed by the local authorities.

These photographs, made during extended annual trips over a ten year period, show how international neo-nomadic counter-cultural identities are represented, reinforced and maintained through the customised trucks, vans, coaches and self-made dwellings they inhabit. Reflecting on values and expectations of home, society and freedom, and the inevitable paradoxes, compromises and entanglements inherent in rejecting the dominant system, the work aims to ask what it means to live an alternative life on the margins of the mainstream.