Handful of Earth

Handful of Earth is a story about the memory of places and a personal portrait of the vast mountain scenery, the forests and the mysterious nature of the Carpathians.

Andrei Becheru made the first pictures for Handful of earth around 2014 by looking at a landscape where generations and generations of people spent their lives in the heart of nature, working on a quite confined piece of land up in the mountains where you have animals and a garden next to the forest. Living in these harsh conditions, by choice or not, is a testimony of acceptance, endurance, a strong connection with a place or the decision to leave behind an old lifestyle.

Overcoming the feeling of being an outsider in this environment, Andrei Becheru gradually and unconsciously searched for a connection between emotions and places by using experimental music.

“I was thinking that for me an image has a sound with a certain intensity and I can try to translate that into a feeling: the sound of birds, the sound of fire, the sound of water, the sound of wind, the sound of silence, the sound of our voices. This landscape kept me amazed for years and I realized I wanted to look at people not in a direct way as I did before, instead to look at life from the perspective of the place where we live, portraying the mountain space in a certain timeline containing fragments of our lives: family photos, the house we were born, now abandoned, the faint memory of a person we loved, a clearing in the forest reminiscent of childhood, or a hill covered with snow where we find peace.”