HENRO

The Shikoku Henro is a circular pilgrimage route that connects 88 Buddhist temples across more than 1,200 kilometres of mountains, forests, and coastal roads. Its origins reach back to the 9th century, to the Buddhist priest Kukai. They did not walk. They cycled. Not in order to move faster, but to move differently. Cycling created a rhythm between speed and stillness: fast enough to cover distance but slow enough to remain exposed to the weather, the fatigue, the silence. There was no fixed plan, no shot list, no locations researched in advance. Woudt did not go to Japan to make photographs. He went to move through a landscape that has been walked for over a thousand years. The images move between landscape, detail, and abstraction. There are no captions. No explanations. The photographs are presented as they are: as fragments that resist narrative.