Some weeks ago, as I was backpacking around the Greek island of Crete, I was lucky enough to meet Mihalis, an ageing beekeeper, while he was selling his honey and traditional liquors on a touristic beach. When I told him I was half Greek, half French, he asked me to help him translate what some French passers-by and potential clients were saying. It turned out to be a success: I ended up spending all afternoon with him, selling and tasting his delicious honey! That initial experience with a traditional beekeeper led me to reflect on how, despite technical progress and the dehumanisation of most ancestral skills, some of them do persist, on a human scale, passed down from one generation to the next. Mihalis learned beekeeping from his mother, who had inherited traditional beekeeping techniques from her own father. By perpetuating and passing on this ancient art to his son Giannis and his grand-daughter Nefeli, Mihalis keeps a tradition alive, making it travel through time and generations. He embodies and personifies the artefact itself, a precious and vulnerable one that ceases to exist as soon as it is no longer transmitted.

Nowadays, many Greek farmers who are choosing to stay away from mass production and industrialisation, see themselves constrained to sell their products on touristic highways and sites to make a living. However, I was surprised to see how genuinely excited Mihalis was when it came to share his products with others, making them taste everything and always sharing stories related to his craft. Selling did not seem to be as important to him as the contact he was having with people. This kind of human exchange is priceless, yet it has almost disappeared: we never get to question who is behind a honey pot in a supermarket, or how many generations have finetuned their craft and art to allow us the beauty of honey.

In my opinion, this indifference towards such a precious legacy is a serious matter. We lost interest in what surrounds us, towards the little things but also the more important ones, like these labours, essentials for human beings. My generation was never taught to sit and observe, nor to take time to think. Everything goes by so fast, we are always in a hurry without even knowing why, we just know that we need to survive in a world which we are leading straight to destruction. We have such an infinite field of choices in what to feel, say, think, how to love and how to be, and we might have lost ourselves on the way. By choosing to photograph Mihalis, I wanted to honour all these people who remain loyal to their timeless heritage and therefore contribute, on their scale, to remind us what we are and where we come from.