Public Project
Ulag players and Opera dancers
Sunset on the lake. Omurbek and I are riding his horse along the shore. It is getting cold there and the boy is whistling at the dogs to bring the goats back inside the pen. Wait... I know this tune - Casta Diva! My companion is an opera dancer during the winter and a shepherd and fierce Ulag player over the summer months. Ulag is a game that could sound heathen to our Western minds, a mix between horseball and rugby, played with a goat carcass. Song Kol meadows make a perfect training ground for the Shepherds to practice and perfect their technique for the next match.
I am not an ethnologist or a reporter and maybe not even a photographer though, as a curious man of the world, I decided to approach the nomad population of Song Kol in Kyrgyzstan. I roamed the roads around the lake, looking for people and objects to connect with. The experience gave me a strange feeling of being very close despite that world being obscure and distant.
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