DNA
ISLAMABAD: A photo exhibition by Ferrante Ferranti ‘From Troy to Lahore’ In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great and Nicolas Bouvier and curated by Shah Zaman Baloch was held at the premises of the French embassy.
Charge d Affaires of the French Embassy Gillaume DABOUTS spoke on the occasion and introduced the artist to the audience.
The artists said in 1980, at the age of twenty, he set off on an initiatory trip to Greece, Inspired by Homer’s Greak eples, the Illad and the Odyssey, and the legend of Alexander the Great In the footsteps of mythological heroes Ulysses and Aeneas.
Rather than awaiting Apollo’s prophecies at Delphi, the navel of the Greek world, they instead consulted the oracles in the East at Didymus, in Minor Asia, on the West at Cumae. not far from Vesuvius and in the south in the oasis of Siwa. There Alexander the Great, young emperor of Macedonia, consulted the oracle of Amen and received the prophecy that he would conquer Asia and set out for the East.
Later, I went in search of the traces of this thousand-year-old palimpsest. In Anatolia and on the banks of the Euphrates, I took measure of the spiritual riches of these Territories at the crossroads between West and East. At Mount Nemrut, Greek Inscriptions told me the story of a king born of Alexander’s conquests who associated Apalle with the Persian god Mithra and the Armenian goddess Anahit at Urfa, the presumed birthplace of Abraham, I attended Friday prayers, at Hierapolis, Roman perticces evoked Persian miniatures My travels then took me to
Armenia, where I stepped off at ruined caravanserais, and to Georgia, where I visited churches overreaching the plains of Azerbaijan I had to wait until 1997 for a new guide to take me further East. Nicolas Bouvier burst into my life, and his book The Way of the World became the breviary of my travels. I followed in his feat steps in Iran, from Table to Persepolis, discovering Sufism.
