Bernard Guillot spent two residencies at the monastery of Saorge, in 2009 and 2010. His pictures make a link between time and history, between vegetation and mineral. Let us not ask what he is: he writes, he paints and he photographs, and for twenty-five years he has lived half the year in Paris and the other half in Cairo — time that stretches, as in the novels of Albert Cossery, settles comfortably into his work. This unbound sixteen-page notebook takes the reader wandering through a monastery that evokes silence. "The gelatin negatives carried here, to the country of walls, beyond the sea, show me traces of a grimoire written in ash, haloes of smoke. They show me the direction of a country closer within me, widely trodden by my ever tender feet. What is this country?"