henro

In March 2024, Dutch fine art photographer Bastiaan Woudt and his brother set out on a journey to the Japanese island of Shikoku. Their destination: the Henro — one of the oldest and most revered pilgrimage routes in the world. The Henro traces a circular path across Shikoku, connecting 88 Buddhist temples through more than 1,200 kilometres of mountains, forests, and coastal roads. Its origins reach back to the 9th century, to the Buddhist priest Kūkai — known as Kōbō Daishi — who walked the island's terrain in pursuit of enlightenment. The four prefectures of Shikoku each mark a distinct spiritual stage: Tokushima (awakening), Kochi (ascetic training), Ehime (enlightenment), and Kagawa (nirvana). For centuries, pilgrims in white robes have traced this same circuit — seeking healing, devotion, or something they cannot yet name. Woudt and his brother did not walk. They cycled. Not in order to move faster, but to move differently — to find their own relationship to the terrain, to distance, to time. There was no fixed plan, no intention to document. What they were looking for was space: time to listen, to observe, to simply be present within a landscape that asks nothing of you except attention. What returned with Woudt was not a travelogue or a record of temples visited. What came back were fragments. Images that resist explanation — photographs that carry the quality of memory rather than fact, of dream rather than documentation. They are not images of a place. They are traces of an experience that cannot be fully captured. Project HENRO is built from those traces.