From 2011 to 2014, singer/author/composer PJ Harvey and photographer Seamus Murphy travelled through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington, D.C., continuing a collaboration begun with the album Let England Shake. There Seamus Murphy collected images (photo and video) marked by an aesthetic developed since the 1990s in his work as a photojournalist; PJ Harvey collected words that would nourish poems and songs.

They transcribed the sensitive interrelationships between territories, images, and poems in an ambitious publication, The Hollow of the Hand. Post-war Kosovo, its villages abandoned and empty; Afghanistan in a state of perpetual conflict; Washington, its neighbourhoods evoking alternatively the symbolic loci of power or the underworld of a fractured society: Seamus Murphy and PJ Harvey examine tension and muff led violence, but also the strange, thrilling immanence of the everyday.

They go beyond simple reporting; they set conflicts in a context, both wide-ranging and manifold, which includes recording reality, representing it, and putting it into perspective through poetic texts.

These poems, photos, and fi lms are never confi ned to a literal, illustrative role. They are multiple, dimensional forms emanating from a single path, a single journey. They are gestures, ways of exploring the real, of experiencing it and performing it, in order to share it with the other side of the world.