There's this progress, incredible progress of technology, everything is figured out, everything is known, everything is systematic and under control, communication is going on, but still there is such a great portion of life that we have utterly no control over. It's completely chaotic. Something could happen overnight.
I always start with reality, in anything I do, everything I do, I always start from something real.
There's something about night and day, and life and death, but animals are also mentioned a lot of times in the bible, showing up in places of desolation, or after destruction, or after the humans left the place, suddenly they would show up.
We're progressing on a lot of fronts, but on the aspect of your responsibility - just the very basics of how we treat each other - before we learn mathematics and computers and science in school, and languages and all of this, the basis of it: What is it to be a human? What responsibility do you have?
Animals are also the ones that are guarding the graves, and they are the ones who communicate between the dead and the alive.
I go and film 50 people in Israel, 50 people in Russia, and 50 people in Romania, in Paris, because I really like to get some particles of something real.
We see everything, we see what's going on in Syria, we see what's going on with the refugees. What can you do about it? And we have to do something.
We are very concerned all the time with figuring out new technologies and advances in science, but really [while] our future is dependent on science and progress, it's not less dependent on the way we treat each other.
You can feel that something terrible is going on in another place in the world, and it's the other, it's not you. It's always there, it's them. But this them is also you.
Animals are always goddesses and gods, like the god Anubis. He's the one who's accompanying the souls to the next life, and he's the one who decides if they will be able to cross or not.
I think that the world is in a very serious decline - very, very serious.
Panorama is the first word for landscape in Greek. It was about [how today] we see everything, we get to see everything, everything is shown to you whether you want it or not, but all of the time you only see fragments of reality. The big picture we really don't see; it's kind of hard to make it up.
I decided to go to the night, myself, and started to go out to the fields, where I would encounter things that I cannot see very well, that I cannot detect very well, and to put myself in a position where I'm going to be suspected as a being entering a territory of other beings, and I'm also going to suspect them. I have to be very alert, and they are going to be very alert - this kind of position I felt was very much what is going on in the world for me.
The night is there, we're trying to ignore the night, the night was always there as children.
You look at them, the animals in the wild, and they stay the same. They have their rules which I cannot decipher, and there's something very strong about that, it's also unknown and for me unpredictable.
I carry some kind of consideration and weight and observations about what is going on in the world, but I don't go to execute it.
We are getting used to levels of violence, we are getting used to seeing these horrific things going on all the time. I think it's tough. It's rough.
I like Palestinians in the morning when they come and we talk but in the evening, who knows, maybe they don't know that I'm nice.
That's what animals do all of the time; they watch out, they watch out, and I saw, "This is us now." Us, the world, we are watching out.
I usually go to bed early to read. I read and I always say that I'm not a "bohemian artist;" I need to read for one or two hours in the evening, and the quiet, so I don't hang out a lot.
We're always trying to avoid being in the darkness, not knowing, and also encountering animals. There's something about them not wanting to be seen; they go out at night, they hide, they don't want to be shown. It's very interesting genetically that they have to hide from us actually. Between themselves, they smell each other, but there is this thing of hiding, of suspicion.
I go back to [the idea] that we are avoiding all of these unknowns, we're avoiding the night - most of us - we're avoiding the encounters, but we're also afraid to deal with something unknown, unseen.
