Naufrago di un nuovo mondo

Haniel Long recreates the account transmitted by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (the leader of the expedition that was first shipwrecked) to his ruler, transforming it into an intense visual narrative – a necessary tale, akin to “a flesh-and-blood being walking alongside a ghost”. Over  the course of eight years, Cabeza de Vaca would lead two companions and a Moor across the entire continent, in an exhausting march that would ultimately reveal itself to be a redemptive journey. Wretched skeletons who have barely survived, deprived of everything, forced to strip themselves of all the principles clothing the soul of a European (first and foremost, the certainty that dirks and daggers increase a man’s strength), they would leave behind everything they had learned beyond the ocean. Bent by unrelenting nature and humiliated by the natives who use them as drudges, they would ultimately reach complete inner nudity. Thus discovering a new inner power – the strength that lies deep within us all and that urges us to give though we have nothing left to give: for the natives, they would become healers.