Photographed by Hamid Sardar in West Taiga, Hovsgol Province, Mongolia - 2006.

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This is part of the “Spirit Animals” limited edition NFT collection by Hamid Sardar: If a measure of the Golden Age, is the degree to which man can speak the language of animals, I came close to finding it once again in Mongolia. Out in the Gobi Desert, I met a fiddler who made a she-camel cry by playing an ancient melody. In the Altai, I witnessed Kazakh shepherds taking baby eagles from the nest, live and hunt with them for years, before releasing them back into the wild. On Mount Burkhan Khaldun, a horse-thief taught me how to call wolves with a secret song.

I found an imaginative resonance out there, between man and animal, that perhaps could not be found in places less primal.

Pastoral nomad culture and art – indeed memory itself - is inconceivable without this totem-like connection to the animal, a fabulous bestiary that taps into a primal layer of human consciousness where it awakens an archaic religious experience.

For humans still living in the wild, survival is based on imitating wild beasts. People hunt, steal and heal by emulating the animal, and when the time comes to journey into other worlds, the shaman transforms into a horse or deer to seek the counsel of the ancestors.

This spiritual connection between man and animal, is the guiding theme of my photography and films. In these new ethnographic dreamscapes, humans no longer occupy the centre of the image. They become just one element floating across the panorama. In fact, without the animal companion life would not be possible and man would appear lost. These compositions remind us that sedentary urban civilization is just one option and that cyclical movements across a pristine range, in the intelligent company of birds and beasts, is not only possible, but also essential to our well-being.

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