With Nomads’ Land, Guillaume Holzer unfolds a photographic series at the crossroads of documentary and visual poetry, exploring the notion of exile through the fate of nomadic maritime communities. Produced in 2019 during a stay of one lunar cycle in the village of Mesa, in the Flores Sea near Komodo, this body of work transports us to the heart of a floating town of nearly 4,000 inhabitants, where various Austronesian populations have lived in settled communities since the 1950s, including the Bugis and the Bajau.
Through these images, Guillaume Holzer pursues a profound reflection on territory, identity, and imposed forms of displacement. His gaze captures fragments of life in which a grounding in reality is accompanied by a sense of suspension, somewhere between memory, disappearance, and timelessness. The photographed scenes convey both the human density of these communities and the fragility of a world undergoing deep transformation.
The series sheds light on the contemporary history of the Bajau, a people of Indo-Malay origin long regarded as one of the last great seafaring nomadic groups. At the heart of their story lies a major tragedy: statelessness, which inscribes their existence within a form of exile that is at once geographical, political, and administrative. For centuries, they lived almost exclusively on the water, navigating between Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Today, political, economic, and environmental pressures have profoundly disrupted their way of life, forcing many of them into sedentarization.
This social rupture is compounded by a major ecological crisis. In the Coral Triangle, destructive fishing practices—notably the use of potassium cyanide and homemade explosives—have contributed to the depletion of one of the richest marine biodiversity regions in the world. In the background, a tension emerges between survival, adaptation, and disappearance, between cultural heritage and the collapse of ecosystems.
But Guillaume Holzer’s work does not stop at observation. It is also rooted in a sensitive attention to Bajau cosmology, in which the ocean remains a living entity, inhabited by presences, forces, and spirits. Currents, tides, reefs, and mangroves make up a relational world with the sea at its center. By rendering this intimate relationship with the living world visible, Nomads’ Land opens up a space of resonance between vernacular memory and contemporary preservation issues.
The singularity of this work also lies in its material treatment. Guillaume Holzer creates his own photosensitive emulsions and applies his processes by hand to various supports, giving each print a unique material presence. The roughness of the surface, the accidents of the medium, and the density of the textures extend the subject into its very form. Photography thus becomes trace, deposit, embodied memory: a way of giving substance to narratives threatened with erasure.
For this publication, we have planned two different covers.
Nomads’ Land
By Guillaume Holzer
22 x 27 cm
192 pages
ISBN : 978-2-493152-10-7
Price : 40 € TTC
Publication date : juillet 2026
Sales and distribution : SAVECA - Art & Paper