The existential Migrant

Maria

This is Maria. She lives in the beautiful Sorrento, Italy. All her life consists in giving the world one of the best food creations ever conceived: mozzarella cheese.
In Maria's farm you can also find olive oil and lemon crops to make the famous Limoncello. Maria doesn't speak english and the only word she knows is "cheese" -for obvious reasons. Hundreds visit Marias farm each week, cruise lines provide to the coast of Italy the people and audience to keep their businesses alive and their children fed. Every day she wakes up and gets ready to give us a lesson on how handmade mozzarella cheese is made and also to make the part of production she needs to sell.
It's amazing to see Maria work with her hands as she braids the cheese, over and over... That makes me realize that being an artisan and surviving as one in a world where everything is automatized is completely admirable.

t first, when I discovered that I wanted to travel and leave the comfortable place I used to call home in Bogotá, I thought the word to describe such feeling was: Wanderlust. But no, after reading some travel blogs and speaking to some other travelers, crew members, guests I meet on the cruises and the places I visit, I found that wanderlust wasn't enough to describe such thing, that's when someone told me the magic words: existential migrant.

The motivations for leaving home always have been lots: wishing to discover the world, face different cultures, points of view, flavors, colors and languages… Adding to that the fact the attraction for anything that was different from the "traditional" things that surrounded me made me realize that it wasn't a common sentiment or desire. This is also something hard to explain to people who really feel attached or bonded to their native place, it is not a matter of hating the place you are from or you live in, it just doesn't feel quite well and it's plain and boring.

Existential migration is defined as "a concept derived from phenomenological research into the lived experience of voluntary migrants who have chosen to leave their country of origin in order to live as foreigners in a new land." Probably the urge for doing this is just the impulse of searching new challenges, exploring different alternatives of life and feeling home being auto exiled.

Sounds a little exaggerate, but I can relate, I can feel home anywhere in the world, it is just a matter of merging and having the attitude, probably some of us have the predisposition to have an itinerary life, without settling down (until a certain moment in life, you can't be a nomad all the time) but with that impulse of making of every new place somewhere nice.

I've never been a real traveller, truth to be told. I just started now, being 26 and with a boring life that precedes me; living in Bogotá for 25 years and not leaving the city that often but with a deep and eager wanderlust eating my guts and pushing me from inside to do it for nice and for all. Right now, I'm working as a cruise ship photographer for Norwegian Cruiseline.

I don't expect this to be a travel diary but a good guide for the place I've got to know along this first contract and this first trip to the Mediterranean, I hope I can get to say something new or at least show you a different approach from a starter's vision in photography and places.

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