One day you arrive in a farm. You ask if you can stay for a few days. They leave you a caravan in the back of the garden and the goats to herd.
You feel quite satisfied with this new occupation. Everyday you wake up at 7 o’clock in the morning and take the goats to the mountains. There they just spread around and start to eat. As far as you’re concerned you spend most of time looking at the landscape. From time to time some of them get into a fight and you have to call for a bit of calm but on the whole they are quite peaceful. Later you show the direction of the valley and they all follow you down except the brown one with the white stains who as always is making some trouble but when you bring most of the herd in one direction she ends up following the movement.
As you reach the valley it’s time for your lunch break. You unwrap a slice of black bread and a piece of cheese made with the milk of those same goats you’re taking care of 8 hours a day. And when you bite in it, it taste as they smell, and in this precise moment it almost fells as if this whole thing would make sense after all; life, death, the solar system, the universe… After lunch everyone is tired and lay in the meadow. You play for a while with the little ones but then they fall asleep, so you simply go on chilling down there in the grass, looking at the sky, thousand kilometres away from the city, from this earlier existence where goat cheese just appeared nicely packed, pasteurized and labelled in the aisles of the supermarkets. At one point they all stand up without notice and go on eating everything they find on their way: grass, fat plants, small trees. The afternoon generally flows like this, relatively uneventful. Around 17h you bring them back to the barn and you go back to your little caravan, exhausted and sun-drunk. You open the door, crash on your bed, fall in the depth of the first shade of the day.
When you wake up night has fallen. In the middle of the garden someone has made a huge fire of pine branch and eucalyptus leaves. You join the people gathered there. Everyone is looking into the fire without saying a word. So you just start doing the thing, you let yourself hypnotised by the flames and by the memories of the last days, you think about the goats, you imagine them a few hundred meters out there in the dark, sleeping in their barn, laying next to each other on the straw, making little goat dreams.
(One day you borrowed a little digital camera from a girl of the farm. You wanted to make a film about the goats but as the hours passed you noticed that they were getting nervous. It seemed that they were not specially happy about the fact that you were filming them. Suddenly they all started to run in random directions so from this moment you decided to switch off the camera and concentrate on your job. It took you more than an hour to gather them and calm them down. Ironically enough a few days later you’ll loose all the video material that you shot on this day. However you won’t feel so upset about this loss, you will even think it’s probably better like this, what’s the point of making film anyway? Maybe the goats would have preferred it this way. So there will be no images left of those days, no traces, just the memory of you and the goats all day long under the blazing sun.)
Olivier Hannoun: http://vimeo.com/ohannoun
