Travel of Art

by Marco Bagni

Marco Bagni is a 'freelance traveller' with some very interesting photos. With this article Marco wants to share his thoughts on travel and photography.

I have spent more than a year as a freelance traveller, and I always adjust myself to different places, people and situations, and I find it extremely exciting and challenging. It’s difficult to write on paper how it feels to manage your own freedom at this level; you actually feel like the world is in your hands and that you can do anything and you feel extremely rich, even though you pay as little as 10 dollars per day!

When I started this journey I had neither a fixed plan, nor a specific project to work with during my travels, but I always kept telling myself to collect material along the way, mostly photos and writings. I said to myself 'sure I will find something to do with it'. I basically took this year as an open project, just to see what would come out in the end. To me, freehand travelling means that you adapt yourself and your skills to the place where you are, with an open mind.

During this year I studied a lot of history and culture. I like history because it’s like an eye to the past, and I like to make my own theories about what I see in present-day situations. I like to think ‘how was this place 50 years ago, or 500?’ I try to imagine the everyday life of people in other times, what was different then and what is similar to the present. I learnt that life is basically a game that goes on in our brain. We are all different but we all are the same. We all have different experiences and different approaches to life, but this is merely due to our previous different experiences and possibilities.

I feel lucky, extremely lucky. I've spent time with people from totally different backgrounds, people with fewer opportunities than me, and learned that true happiness is something that goes beyond our thoughts. Every human has moments of happiness and moments of sadness; these moments are the essence of our being. These moments neither spring from wallets nor from material things. I’m not trying to be politically correct and I’m not trying to say that 'the less you have the happier you are'. No, I don’t think so. What I am trying to say is that each one of us can make a difference by himself, and gather new experiences and stories.

During my travels I have met people who were amazed by that small black box I was using to snap pictures. I have met people who looked at me and seemed to wonder what the hell I was doing in their village with it. But in the end it didn't matter; I was a foreigner, a guest, and people mostly welcome foreigners and make them feel at home. To me this was beautiful.

During my travels I also discovered that I want to be a photographer because it’s the perfect excuse for me to wander around, meet local people, be their friend and learn their language and customs.

The big treasure which I found during these travels is a new approach to life: I, being 'just another westerner', learnt that life can be different; life can be totally ok, or totally bad, depending on many small or big things. It’s all about evolution - personal evolution.

Someone can say that Burma is another planet, and I would accept that. But when you are in Burma, the rest of the world is another planet; do you know what I mean? When you are in Burma you don’t really care about what’s happening on the homepage of bbc.com. You are on another planet and you just care about what is going on there. You walk around with your mind open to seize all the expressions. Of course you don’t feel Burmese. You will never feel Burmese because you are not Burmese, but you are there with your different background and your other experiences.

I saw more sincere smiles in Burma than anywhere else I’ve been. By saying this I don’t mean that life down there is better; in a country where the government is massively repressing every voice of disapproval and keeping people under total control in poverty. It’s hard to understand how the people can be so happy. Maybe it is the Buddhism, maybe it is the power of despair, or maybe it is because they don’t really know anything different. They are living their lives, they accept them the way they are, and they seem to love it. Maybe it is hard to accept these words, maybe my thoughts seems crazy or superficial, but that is my impression after spending time in these places, focusing on the everyday life of normal people. In the end I think this world is perfect in its imperfection.

That’s why I’m doing ironic videos and graphic postcards: because everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen smiles, even in Russia! There’s a message behind this: it doesn’t matter who you are and where you come from in order to get a beautiful life. Happiness hides inside a sea of small things, and it’s up to each one of us to decide whether we see the glass half full or half empty - one day we might instead decide to just drink it and savour the taste.

I embarked on a journey, the kind of journey for which you quit your job and just go - you know the day you leave but have no idea when you’ll be back; it might be in one month or in three years.

I’ve been lucky enough to talk with the right people, and I understood right on time that since opportunities come once in a lifetime, I’d better take them, because tomorrow might be too late. The main reason why I made this choice is that, as I’d like to say, I’m not travelling to discover myself, but to discover all the rest.

And my career? I had a job, making animations and web design, which is also my passion, but I’m certain that one year of travelling has given me more experience and inspiration than three years of work would have done! Therefore, I’ve decided to use this journey also like a personal multimedia experiment, combining photography, writing, graphic design and video.

I still don’t know what will come out of all the material I’m collecting, but I know for sure that being on the road with the purpose of living adventures and learning new ways of life is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.

During my travel routine I have every day at least few ‘working hours’, which means that I’m wandering around with my camera ready to snap whatever my eyes focus on. It’s beautiful.

I’m opening my heart and my brain to new people, trying to get the most out of every encounter. Every day I feel like I’m carrying around my small artistic sense and using it in a way I’ve never done before, because the environment is constantly different and the vibes and emotions of each specific place enter both my skin and my camera.

In my previous life I used to give motion to still objects with my computer animation software. Now, I’m having a lot of fun in freezing time with my camera; I try to catch the moment, try to grab smiles and make them eternal.

The beautiful part of this process is one which I cannot put to writing, it is the personal feeling of being there and being real. By simply writing how happy I felt, it instantly makes it lose meaning and it become ‘just another comment’ amongst thousands of others you can find anywhere on the internet.

I think the secret of art is ephemeral, just the same as the secret of travelling. Once you write about it to make it a concept, it becomes something different.

The most rewarding experiences are the ones when I’m alone, hitchhiking in remote areas, travelling without any destination, just to see where I end up. That is when I feel like time is left behind and nothing else matters, where I feel welcomed by people that give their hospitality to a foreign nomad, where the smiles are truer and more intense. Where life is about small things and you don’t need much to be happy.

I took my art with me for a journey; I used the art of travelling to make a travel of the art.

By Marco Bagni

(Edited by Leif Söderlund)

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