Travelling means accepting changes of every kind, and it is also by the measure of those upheavals of daily life that one gauges the distance covered. For Reiner Riedler the distance that counts, the one that nourishes and intoxicates, is human — cultural, anthropological, symbolic — more than geographical. Since the beginning of the nineteen-nineties a thirst for travel, understood as access to the outside and to the unknown, has pushed him onto the roads of central Europe, around his native Austria. That was of course the time of the fall of the Wall and of the opening of the Eastern bloc; it was also the time of his own twenties. One imagines easily the fascination a young Austrian could feel for those neighbouring countries whose culture is so different from the one he grew up in: Albania, the Balkans, then step by step Poland, Ukraine, and finally Russia. Twenty years later he is one of the essential figures of a generation that keeps exploring the borders between document and fiction; self-taught, he has forged and refined a personal style mixing corrosive humour, delicacy, exuberance and nostalgia.