Handful of Earth is a story about the memory of places and a personal portrait of the forests, the vast mountain scenery and the mysterious nature of the Carpathians in Romania.

Andrei Becheru started this project by looking at a landscape where generations and generations of people spent their life in the heart of nature, working on a quite confined piece of land up in the mountains where you have animals and a garden next to the forest.

Choosing or not to live in these harsh conditions in the mountains tells things about acceptance, endurance, having a strong connection with the place or giving up a very old lifestyle.

“I was thinking that for me an image has a sound with a certain intensity and I can try to translate that into a feeling: the sound of birds, the sound of fire, the sound of water, the sound of wind, the sound of silence, the sound of our voices.

This landscape kept me amazed for years and I realized I wanted to look at people not in a direct way as I did before, instead, I was looking at life from the perspective of the place where we live, portraying the mountain space in a certain timeline containing fragments of our lives: family photos, the house we were born, now abandoned, the faint memory of a person we loved, a clearing in the forest reminiscent of childhood, or a hill covered with snow where we find peace.”