During the month of December I was a guest of Hektor, a farmhouse that hosts artists in residence on the incredible island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. In this time I had the opportunity to observe the vulcanic landscapes of the island and immerse myself in them through observational drawing.

In recent years, I have developed a series that I called ‘Terra di Dio’ after the Rossellini’s masterpiece.

These images are guiding me to conduct a visual research on volcanic islands that for me have always been an idyllic symbol of curiosity and mystery.

Like in Tarkovsky’s “Zone” the landscapes here are taking the shape of a psychological site, every place is real and fantastic at the same time. This is the point at which psychology and geography collide. These are territories of communication with the subsoil , a Dante’s otherworldly dimension that invites us to pass beyond the bounds of our own, established and thus-far limited self, to understand ourselves as, like the land, always in flux, ever in process, elemental and eruptive, ancient and renewed, splitting and spilling only to reform.

photographs by Yves Drieghe