Le Caÿstre, 2024

Photograph, pigment print on FineArt Baryta Hahnemühle, 105 x 135 cm

Ephesus, in what is now western Turkey, is an ancient Greek city bordered by two rivers that flow into the Aegean Sea. It was here, between the Caÿstre and the Meander, that the philosopher Heraclitus lived in the fifth century BC. We know his thought only through a hundred or so quotations, often brief and enigmatic, recounted by other authors such as Aristotle, Plutarch and Seneca. And yet, because these fragments have given rise to numerous commentaries and analyses from Plato to Nietzsche, his vision of a world in perpetual motion and his reflections on the impermanence of things have had a profound impact on Western philosophy.

In Letters to Lucilius, Seneca evoked a phrase of Heraclitus that would become famous: «You never bathe in the same river twice». :

« None of us wakes up the same as we were yesterday. Our bodies move like rivers. Everything you see runs to the rhythm of time (...) This is what Heraclitus said: twice in the same river we go down, and don’t go down. The river has kept its name, the water has passed ».

The beds of the Caÿstre and the Méandre have changed constantly over the centuries, but they remain witnesses to the era of Heraclitus.