Joan Riera doesn't stand still. The world is very large, as is his curiosity. When he speaks with ARA, he already has a trip to Equatorial Guinea ready to trace the steps of the Spanish colonial era and interact with the local population. Then he leaves for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This anthropologist from Vallès has specialized in studying and visiting isolated communities. "My father had a great interest in African art and its influence on contemporary art. And this led us to go to Cameroon when I was young. We established a relationship with those countries, to the point that my father would end up buying a house and staying there to live," he explains. It would be logical to think that it was during those periods in Africa that he decided he would be an anthropologist. But listening to himself, Joan has discovered that it is not exactly like that. "I believe that my love for anthropology, for other people and the worlds that end up being born thanks to my grandmother. A farmer's daughter who raised me as a child in a farmhouse in Cerdanyola, in Collserola. She used to tell me stories of a rural Catalonia that I no longer knew. I believe that those nights in her bed listening to what she told me, whether they were tales or lessons on how to know the land, were key." An umbilical cord connects a Catalan farmhouse with the rituals of populations living very isolated in southern Sudan, one of the trips Joan was most eager to take. And which he has finally been able to do and it has moved him.