BREAKING #320

The wildest animals

Nicole Ex

Column

May 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

May 2026

It’s a deeply held collective conviction, yet I don’t actually believe you find yourself when you travel. I believe, rather, that you find the other. That travel is about losing yourself in other people, and in otherness itself, until you become untethered from the mould we call ‘identity’. And perhaps that is what freedom feels like. On the road, I become less myself, and more human.

Take the melting pot of airports, where we are all anonymous extras in transit. That smallness of self within the swirl of people from every corner of the world. Yet sometimes, for mysterious reasons, something or someone suddenly stands out amidst the indifferent crowd. Istanbul Havalimanı, during a layover:

A Japanese man walks beside a Japanese woman wearing a French beret. Both are elderly – fragile and composed, sharp and refined. Without speaking, they quietly look after one another as they glide their tickets through the self-scanner. At first I think I am the only one seeing them, until I notice that others, too, are photographing them, as though they were a rare presence in the current of passers-by.

The instinct had been to stay at home, to barricade the door, to build a nest of wool, dust and feathers. Until I realised it would be better to fly beneath the threatening cloud cover. Could we, like hummingbirds, move from flower to flower, carrying pollen from one to another? The Only True Protest Is Beauty, proclaims the Fondation Dries Van Noten in Venice.

But beauty is not simply there for the taking. Travelling means navigating: between openness and estrangement, between the tourist trap and something more original – the studio of Frances van Hasselt, and that 300-million-year-old piece of earth, with its furthest horizons, deepest silence, clearest air, darkest night, brightest water and wildest animals.

The humanist Erasmus wrote: ‘The whole world is my fatherland.’ It is a wonderful premise, though not yet one I have fully made my own. What I do recognise is that perhaps we only begin to feel at home when we come to know the other – and, along the way, briefly forget who we thought we were.

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