I have been dreaming of Australia from the depths of my village ever since I met a friend who left the country for good. That was nearly 40 years ago. Inside me I carried this secret of travelling to the other side of the world and encountering this strange land.

The country does not reveal itself to the hurried traveller. You need to spend whole months following straight roads, jogged to bits on the rugged red dirt tracks, to find yourself in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between the wind, flies and small dragons which observe the intruder as they scurry about. Here, you are only a passenger in time, wandering between prehistory, vast innocent or cruel virgin land, and decadent oases, haunted by the Aboriginal shadows on the fringe of development.

I hoped that this show would mainly be a return to the beginnings, a voyage to dreamtime, to the origins of Creation. Then I wanted to pay homage to this gréât Aboriginal history that came into being at least 40,000 years ago; to try to take you along one of these dream trails which, starting from mythical Spirits immortalized in stone, lead you to the heart of these paintings, which are sometimes surprisingly contemporary.

I would also like you to lose yourselves in these strange, vast, red landscapes, the solitude of the journey, and the silence of its immutability. This is the deep soul of Australia, but, because this land is so unbearable to live on, the population draws closer to the ocean and the sea breezes. I would almost have liked you to forget the Whites, to treat them as the epiphenomena that came at the end of a very long chain, but, in this, I too, had to return to reality. So immerse yourself too in these cosmopolitan cities, the emblems of the New World that have a good smell of the sea, imagination, and freedom.

I hope that this show will make you feel the quintessence of these journeys, in which one can virtually lose oneself in ones origins and identity. Nowhere else in the world have I felt this mixture of prehistory and modernity, this need to relive our origins, and at the same time, the desire to change everything.