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ARDHA, 2020-2024



ARDHA is a contemporary photographic project by Anouchka Renaud-Eck that explores notions of union, separation, and the search for complementarity through matrimonial practices in contemporary India. Emerging from an intimate starting point, a personal breakup followed by a stay in Kerala, the project develops through an immersion within the close circle of a friend confronted with the social and familial constraints surrounding romantic choices.


Between lived experience and shared realities, ARDHA questions how individuals construct affective relationships in a context where personal aspirations constantly negotiate with collective expectations. The project examines the evolving forms of partner-seeking in a society deeply shaped by tradition, yet undergoing rapid transformation driven by globalization, urbanization, and digital technologies.

LUNGO LA ROMEA

The Romea Strada, an ancient Roman road, has become over the centuries and through modern developments a 177-kilometre highway. Today it connects the Veneto region to the Riviera of Emilia-Romagna. In the 1970s, it embodied the call of holidays, departures to the South, the promise of sun and sea. A road that was then joyful, almost festive.

But today, the Romea, and its extension toward Rome, is nothing more than a ribbon of asphalt crossing hollowed landscapes made of silence and abandoned land. Forgotten villages, ghostly service stations, deserted buildings: the world along the Romea seems frozen outside of time. Cars speed by, people pass through, but few stop. Few look.

Through my photographs, I have tried to capture the still-living memory of these places, to listen to their echoes. I met those who live in these margins, these borderlands. Their lives are discreet, almost erased, but deeply marked by this road, at once a line of escape and an inner frontier, a mythological remnant and an axis of contemporary solitude.