Afghanistan: chronotopia

Mikhail Bakhtin might have called this kind of landscape a "chronotope": a place that allows movement through space and time simultaneously, a place that displays the "layeredness" of time. The chronotopia of Afganistan is like a mirror, shattered and thrown into the mud of the past; the shards are glittering fragments, echoing previous civilizations and lost greatness.

Na foto, um homem vendedor de balões (proibidos durante o regime Taliban), junto do que já foi uma casa de chá no meio de um parque.

As fotografias do Afeganistão de Simon Norfolk são parte de um projecto abrangente a que ele chama Et in Arcadia ego, que pretende reflectir sobre a forma como a guerra (e a nossa necessidade de a travar) formou o nosso mundo:

What these landscape have in common - their basis in war - is fundamentally downplayed in our society. I was astounded to discover that the long, straight, bustling, commercial road that runs through my old neighborhood of London follows an old Roman road. [...] Crucially, the road system built by the Romans was their highest military technology, their equivalent of the stealth bomber [...] - a technology that allowed a huge empire to be maintained by a relatively small army. [...] It is extraordinary that London, a city that should be shaped by Tudor kings, the British Empire, Victorian engineers and modern international Finance, is a city fundamentally drawn, even to this day, by abandoned Roman military hardware.