At the heart of On My Way lies a paradox of longing: the closer we come to what we desire, the greater the risk of losing the image we have made of it. The work draws on L’Amour de loin, the opera by Kaija Saariaho on a libretto by Amin Maalouf, inspired by the medieval legend of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel and his love for Clémence, a woman he has never met. His love lives on absence, shaped by imagination and by the descriptions of others. When he finally sets sail towards her, anticipation turns to fear: meeting her may dissolve the perfection of the woman he has imagined.
That moment of doubt is the starting point of the work. The crossing towards the beloved echoes the longing for a distant homeland, where the desire to return coexists with the knowledge that the place remembered may no longer exist as it once did. Distance lets memory preserve and idealise; proximity threatens to expose the gap between what was imagined and what remains.
During her residency in Lebanon in 2017, Kosmatopoulos travelled daily by local microbus from Beirut to the Syrian refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley, and recorded the journeys as they were: doors slamming, engines running, cars passing, passengers getting on and off, conversations overlapping, music playing inside the vehicle. Into this raw sound she introduced passages from the fourth act of the opera, sung by the Lebanese-Greek countertenor Matteo El Khodr, the act in which Jaufré’s journey becomes inseparable from his apprehension.
The two journeys are heard at once, through a single megaphone set on a stack of wooden pallets, an instrument made for announcements rather than for song. The operatic voice rises through traffic and conversation and lends the ordinary ride an almost mythological dimension; then a door slams, an engine starts, a passenger speaks, and the idealised voyage is brought back to the road. Neither serves as background for the other. The ordinary journey takes on the intensity of a quest, while the opera’s idealisation becomes vulnerable to the interruptions of lived reality.
Within L’amour de loin, this encounter touches a central contradiction of exile: the longing for a home kept in memory, and the fear that returning might reveal how deeply it has changed. The artist’s own journey is not presented as equivalent to forced displacement. Its concrete sound becomes the setting in which the allegory of return, desire and disillusionment meets the everyday world.
On My Way dwells in the moment before arrival, when the imagined destination has not yet been confronted with reality. Like Jaufré travelling towards a beloved he knows only through stories, the desire to return home may rest on an image that distance has made both more precious and more fragile, and returning might mean recovering what was lost, or discovering that it exists only in memory.
