Ancient african beliefs are not allien to Jordi Esteva. At the end of the 1990s, he travelled to the Côte d'Ivoire, invited by its Ministry of Culture, to see through a photographic project about drumology, the language of drums. After travelling through the country's interior for two weeks, he was not satisfied. He intuited that he was obtaining a series of images that were perhaps interesting but didn't contribute anything new. It was then that, through a series of apparent coincidences, he was able to make contact with Yéo Douley, assistant to Jean-Marie Addiafi, a scholar of animism, and Adjoumani Raujer, the son of an Abron king. Through them he met the priestess Adjoua Eponom Essouman who, following a series of rituals, received him into her sanctuary.

Jordi Esteva returned to the country on two other occasions, staying an average of two months on each trip. Thanks to the empathy between him and the priestess and the successive rituals he undertook, including sacrifices, he enjoyed the privilege of coming closer to the hidden world of African animism. The book  Viaje al país de las almas (Journey into the Land of Souls) came about as a consequence of all of this. This work brings together his photographs, research and experiences of the animism of the Anyi, a people related to the Ashanti of the region on the border with Ghana.

Esteva never thought he would return to the Côte d'Ivoire, though he had promised Adjoua and her fetishes that he would. The civil war that divided the country in half and the subsequent state of insecurity left his promise pending, and, involved in other affairs, it was forgotten completely. But in March of 2008, he received a call from Yéo: “Les fetiches se sont manifestés et ils te reclament”.

 For the first time in ten years, he remembered forgotten sensations. The memories of everything he had experienced were revived as if he had only just come back. He remembered the transformations the animist priestess Adjoua suffered when she was possesed by Aboyà, the king of the hunters, and how she became like a child when she transformed into Mami Watta, the deity of water. He felt the need to return there.

He admired a culture in which the primary depositaries of its knowledge were women; a culture that respected the forests and knew their secrets, like medicinal plants, and used only the leaves, roots and barks that were strictly necessary; a culture that, above all, rather than marginalising what is different and would be condemned to ostracism or relegated to madness at other latitudes, knew how to take advantage of and redirect extraordinary energies to turn them into depositaries of an ancestral wisdom that could only be accessed in a state of trance. The rituals and the stories of the spirits fascinated him because they were beautiful metaphors. The Komian allowed themselves to be possessed by a being already found within, and through a great command of trance techniques, to get a hidden part of themselves to appear — that which is sacred, to give it a name of some sort.