Le Royaume gathers photographs made between 2017 and 2020 during two distinct events: a sporting event called the Mud Day in France and the Bloco da Lama in Paraty, Brazil, during carnival. Every year in France thousands of participants meet for a festive course punctuated by trials in the silt, replaying the emergence of prehistoric humans from their caves. The blue, grey or black mud anonymises bodies and faces and works as a second skin, ancestral sediment that protects them but also freezes them in a role. The covered bodies look thick, like a world threatening to lose its outlines, and their mysterious gestures speak of a life on the margins and of the incessant struggle to inhabit the world.