Every place is an experience, a different manifestation of reality.
Every place is a fictional place. It is a dream for those wanting to go there, a nightmare for those trying to escape, a memory in a traveller’s photo album or a dim backdrop for traffic jams and check-out lines.
Every place is a canvas, a stage, the outline of the lives lived within. It takes ochre and vermilion to add blood, drums to start a pulse, and poetry to add laughter and tears, stories to make a place real.
Stories open our eyes, revealing the significance of a certain place, in a certain time. In reverse, stories shape places, and the identities of everyone having been born there, died there, or just passed through.
It is impossible to experience a place without its stories, and sometimes, like in times of a pandemic, stories will have to suffice, to make a distant place become real in our minds.