When I arrived in Saint-Girons in 2018, a 6.000 inhabitants city at the foot of the Pyrenees, there was this recurring feeling of being on an island. With the pandemic, this feeling had increased, and I was learning the life of a small rural city the hard way. Once the health restrictions were lifted, the feeling never left me. During the first confinement, I started photographing during the walks authorised by the government. At first, I mainly sought to get to know the city where I had chosen to live by doing a visual diary. Then, things turned slowly into a sort of photographic survey. When it was again possible to go out as far as possible, I realised that beyond this 1km radius the city stopped, quite abruptly at times. I kept photographing despite this, with a soft black and white approach, working around the idea that keeping things I saw in a frame would help me make sense of my presence. I followed the same routes for several months, and came across those of other inhabitants. Everyone did the same. Through repetition, patterns have a way to appear. Quietly, and thanks to the stories told by the people I met and photographed, the landscape started to talk. Progressively, I was able to understand the presence of those palm trees, for example, scattered by people returning to their native region after long years of emigration, to Paris or the colonies. I could see how people shared connections, how their stories were different but similar, almost like in a direct line of descent. Even my photographs, reminding me of the way the rural south in the US had been documented, started to evoke a certain filiation. After five years down there, it is a canvas of a fine irregular mesh that these photographs have formed, a canvas of lines running along one another and sometimes meeting.