Exodus

In his own words

Exodus is the most narrative series, the one that tells the story of an escape. It is a metaphor for climate displacement — human and animal. Here, polar bears become the migrants of a melting world, forced to leave their land, their bearings, their ice. I imagined them wearing life jackets, boarding makeshift rafts, facing a vast and indifferent sea. These images echo the human tragedies we see every day: families fleeing drought, famine and rising waters.

The idea for Exodus came from pain and anger. Pain at the foretold disappearance of certain species, and anger at our collective indifference. Global warming is no longer an abstract threat: it is already killing. It condemns entire populations to exile, upends ecosystems and erases landscapes that once seemed eternal.

By putting polar bears side by side with human migrants, I wanted to remind us that we are all part of the same exodus. Together we are leaving the planet as we knew it, driven by the same urgency, the same waters. The fate of some sheds light on that of others: a polar bear drifting on an empty sea is not so different from a child in an overcrowded dinghy.

The series ends with a deliberately unbearable image: a bear cub washed up on a beach, wearing a small red top. It is an indirect tribute to the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian child found dead on a Turkish beach in 2015. I hesitated for a long time before creating this image. But in the end I decided I had to dare. Because it says everything — without words, without speeches. It joins human and animal distress in a single cry. It speaks of lost innocence, of lives broken by a system that destroys without seeing.

With Exodus, I wanted viewers to feel a jolt, a vertigo. To understand that this flight is not only other people’s: it is ours. We are all on the same raft, on the same sea. And the silence surrounding this migration of the living world may be the most terrifying thing of our time.