Assyrians

Romane collected testimonies from members of the Assyrian community between Belgium and France, complementing the stories of her own grandfather and the notebooks of her great-grandfather who arrived in France from Iran. The photographer conducted an investigation by gathering the stories of this diaspora composed of different generations. Objects transported during exile, family photos, traditional outfits for festivals, figurines of protective figures from ancient Mesopotamia, landscapes, and maps appear. By blending past and present, Romane photographs by intuition and also uses fiction to evoke this quest for origins present in each of us. A project to keep a memory, a trace. To portray a scattered people trying to preserve their connections despite the distance. The members of the community fled their countries: Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran. What traces? What memories do they keep of their lands? How to rebuild elsewhere? Are they assimilated in the country where they are? How to perpetuate their culture and language: Aramaic? A collective memory is created through these voices that tell her. Romane then went to the Tur Abdin region in Turkey on the border with Syria.  If this community had a country it would be in this territory between Syria, Turkey and Iran.Cradle of the Assyrian community.  The photographer followed a group of young French and Belgian people to return to their roots for the first time in the land of their ancestors. Throughout the villages she met people who came to rebuild their houses. Between myth and return to basics, the photographer creates a symbolic territory through this people in search of landmarks. What are these links that provide a feeling of belonging to spaces and communities?  Do countries really own the territories they inhabit?  What other territories are possible?‍

Os Encantados – The Enchanted Ones is a documentary inquiry by artist and photographer Romane Iskaria, bringing together photography, documentary film, archival materials, and narratives drawn from field research. Developed as a long-term project, the work emerged from an immersion in Northeastern Brazil, within communities whose spiritual, botanical, and territorial knowledge remains deeply threatened yet profoundly alive. ‍ The project originates in the quilombola communities of Ipiranga, in Conde, before expanding into a broader investigation of Jurema Sagrada, a spiritual tradition rooted in Indigenous matrices and shaped by Afro-Brazilian heritages. Through an approach grounded in long-term engagement, listening, and relational practice, Romane Iskaria explores the connections between memory, spirituality, territory, and transmission. ‍ At the center of this research lies Jurema, a sacred plant (Mimosa hostilis Benth) used in ritual practices and associated with the Encantados, spiritual entities present within Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cosmologies. Jurema embodies a living memory of the land, a link between visible and invisible worlds, but also a form of resistance against historical, cultural, and environmental erasure. ‍ Many Mestres and Mestras of Jurema also perpetuate healing practices rooted in sacred plants and vernacular knowledge systems. This dimension has led to the development of several photographic series and lines of inquiry focused on gestures of healing, oral transmission, and the relationships between body, nature, and spirituality. ‍ Through portraits, landscapes, objects, plants, and ritual traces, Os Encantados constructs a sensitive cartography of territories inhabited by invisible presences, surviving memories, and contemporary forms of resistance. The project questions what becomes of these cosmologies as territories transform, knowledge holders disappear, and the balance between humans, spirituality, and the environment grows increasingly fragile. ‍ Situated between documentary practice and intuitive perception, Os Encantados seeks to make visible worlds often marginalized within dominant narratives of Brazilian identity. The project pays tribute to those who protect, transmit, and reinvent these living heritages, deeply rooted both in the land and in the invisible.