Where Gods Whisper

The result of long journeys in which, for years, the author went through the countries of the world where religions coexist, Sacred Crossings documents the last oases of encounter between faiths, free zones where Jews, Muslims and Christians pray together or together rebuild monasteries destroyed by wars, where the chain of revenge has broken, where they eat the same food, they sing the same songs, they make the same gestures. A parallel world, and slightly reported, ranging from Central Asia to Latin America, from Russia to the Middle East, that returns through evocative images in color and black and white the beauty that lies in contamination: the Dionysian rites of Muslims in Maghreb, the mourn of dead in the Balkans, the pilgrimages in the mud on the Urals, the evocation of the gods in exile overseas, on the route of the "smugglers" of the past, in Haiti and Cuba, where the spiritual strength of Mother Earth becomes ritual voodoo, santeria, mystical rap, samba, epithalamium and mystery.

The photographs and texts by Monika Bulaj show all her multifarious talent: the sensitivity to the otherness of the anthropologist, the instinct of the testimony of the chronicler, the sense of the storytelling of the writer, the passion that for years has led her on the trail of "people of God", from the Greek and Russian orthodox Christians to the Shiites, from the Ethiopian Church to Sufism, from the Mountain Jews to the Italian or Polish Catholics.

Monika Bulaj, Polish photojournalist, reporter, non-fiction writer, documentary film-maker and TED fellow based in Italy, is exploring the borderlands of Monotheism, the nomadic tribes, the minorities, the migrants, the outcasts, the dispossessed in Eastern Europe, Middle East, Caucasus, Central Asia, Africa and Caribbean. She published as a freelance photographer and writer with La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, GEO, National Geographic, The New York Times - Lens, TIME Lightbox, Courrier International, Al Jazeera, RevueXXII.