I really tend to consider the planet as one city or one house with many rooms. People who actually believe that Morocco is Morocco only, or that Belgium is Belgium only, well, they are wrong. Just imagine that people invented passports. That means that, before that, you could just walk. I mean, the planet is round, so you can turn right around it. The only thing that limits you, then, is a river or a mountain range or an absence of courage. Airplanes don’t help us see the world as an undivided space; we see it as a schizophrenic environment, almost like different planets in one. But while travelling so much and being in three different places in one week – like Bamako, Brussels, and Bangkok – I saw the world as it is, moving simultaneously.

You know that machine, the ancestor of the cinema? This machine has one lens with maybe 50 individual pictures of a horse running at different stages on a disc, and when you spin that disc, all the different images animate so that it looks like one single instance of the horse running. It’s like that; you realize suddenly that, if you move between places that are not really the same, and you spin fast, suddenly you understand the movement of trade and the dynamics of the world. Instead of seeing different fixed pictures of a horse, you see a horse running.

Eric van Hove