Romane Iskaria

Romane collected testimonies from members of the Assyrian community between Belgium and France, complementing the stories of her own grandfather and the notebooks of her great-grandfather who arrived in France from Iran. The photographer conducted an investigation by gathering the stories of this diaspora composed of different generations. Objects transported during exile, family photos, traditional outfits for festivals, figurines of protective figures from ancient Mesopotamia, landscapes, and maps appear. By blending past and present, Romane photographs by intuition and also uses fiction to evoke this quest for origins present in each of us. A project to keep a memory, a trace. To portray a scattered people trying to preserve their connections despite the distance. The members of the community fled their countries: Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran. What traces? What memories do they keep of their lands? How to rebuild elsewhere? Are they assimilated in the country where they are? How to perpetuate their culture and language: Aramaic? A collective memory is created through these voices that tell her. Romane then went to the Tur Abdin region in Turkey on the border with Syria.  If this community had a country it would be in this territory between Syria, Turkey and Iran.Cradle of the Assyrian community.  The photographer followed a group of young French and Belgian people to return to their roots for the first time in the land of their ancestors. Throughout the villages she met people who came to rebuild their houses. Between myth and return to basics, the photographer creates a symbolic territory through this people in search of landmarks. What are these links that provide a feeling of belonging to spaces and communities?  Do countries really own the territories they inhabit?  What other territories are possible?‍

In “Los Encantados” (The Enchanted Ones in English), Romane Iskaria describes the lives of the descendants of the Quilombo communities who reside in a sacred area called the Land of Jurema, in the northeast of Brazil. The Quilombos are communities formed by enslaved black people who fled to remote and unclaimed lands. Even today, they are affected by the lingering aftereffects of colonialism and fight for the preservation of their land and ancestral culture. As the writer Sandro Guimarães de Salles describes in his book “A sombra da Jurema encantada”, the Land of Jurema is a place of spiritual importance where the veil between worlds is porous, the author speaks of “invisible cities” listing ten sacred places in the Nordeste region. Through encounters related to her own heritage, Romane Iskaria deploys the notion of territory as a space for gathering, holding and sharing, to reflect on cohesion and challenge dominant narratives. Romane transmits Jurema’s visual vibration by traversing these inaccessible territories, transcending the boundary between physical and intangible, their spiritual experiences are envisioned as individual but collectively shared spaces, from which they cannot be deprived. , a spiritual invocation practiced by this population of the Northeast, Brazil, who are denied the possibility of defining themselves culturally and geographically. As inaccessible territories, transcending the boundary between physical and intangible, their spiritual experiences are envisioned as individual but collectively shared spaces, from which they cannot be deprived.