Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets: Eva Joly-Kriydi
Eva Joly-Kriydi was born in Paris, which means she has spent most of her adult life figuring out what to do with that.
Paris isn't a backdrop for her: it's a condition. A city she has loved, resented, left and returned to enough times that the relationship has stopped needing a name. "I have an almost familial relationship with Paris," she says. "You can hate it, you can leave it. But it will always remain your anchor."
Eva runs Hors Champs Agency, a creative studio working across branding, digital strategy and what she calls aesthetic intelligence (*chic*). She is also a photographer. A design obsessive. Someone who hunts for obscure film screenings on Tuesday nights and knows which Parisian café serves the right cinnamon knot for a bad morning. She moves between these worlds without announcing it.
We invited her to join our series Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets, a portrait project dedicated to those whose experience of the world is measured in (true) meaning.
"You never truly leave your city."
Walking through Paris, she says, is an act of involuntary memory. The corner of a street. A lit window. A piece of terrace. Each one pulling you into a version of yourself you thought you'd left behind.
And yet she leaves. Regularly, deliberately, curious about what each new city will do to her.
"The smell of an airport exit is my most precious travel memory, because it is the most impossible to share."
When we asked what a souvenir means to her, Eva didn't reach for objects. She reached for air.
"What I can share is something few people talk about: the smell of a place. Not the heart of the city; but the exact moment when you step out of an airport and the air fills your lungs entirely."
She has mapped the world this way. Warm and woody: Rome. Heavy and sweet: Los Angeles. Fresh and earthy: London. Warm, humid, carrying the scent of the maquis: Corsica.
It is, she says, the most intimate travel memory she owns. Impossible to photograph. Impossible to give to anyone else.
This is also, she thinks, what travel reveals about memory itself. Even when you share a journey with someone, you never share the same experience. The story belongs to whoever tells it. "When you travel alone, everything becomes incredibly subjective and every part of the story belongs to you."
What Eva brings in her bag when she travels
She'd love, she says, to have a clean answer. A perfectly curated list of the same essentials every time, extremely chic. In reality, every journey brings out a different personality.
But there is a constant: a small survival pouch. A pen. Cash. Hair ties. A clip. Gloss. Compeed. "Everyday essentials that suddenly become small talismans abroad. As if you were carrying a piece of your routine with you."
Then the cameras. The notebooks. A small photo printer. The tools of someone trying to hold onto something she already knows she can't fully keep. "I like the idea of trying to capture a memory," she says, "even though you know you will be the only person who truly knows all the secrets behind it."
"Nothing feels stronger than stepping off a plane and finding someone you love waiting."
The memory she holds closest isn't a place. It's a moment of arrival.
The airport exit. Someone you love, already there. The car moving through a familiar landscape, local radio playing, windows down.
"Those are my true safe place memories. I don't think I have ever experienced anything more powerful than that."
Paris by Eva Joly
Eva's Paris runs on timestamps.
Morning coffee at Fauna. Just coffee on busy days. Avocado toast before sport. The warmed cinnamon knot when the day already feels heavy.
Lunch at Doki Doki when time is short, Steam Bar when it isn't, two latkes from Florence Kahn somewhere in between.
Afternoons belong to museums. She holds membership cards for nearly all of them, loyalties staying with MAD and the Musée d'Orsay. Between seasons she follows Matter & Shape, Design Week, the Biennale. She hunts for fashion and design magazines at Cahier Central, Archivist, OFR.
Her guilty pleasure is what she calls the champagne gourmand: a flute and a Nutella crêpe at Flore en l'Île or La Rose de France. "Being a tourist in your own city is sometimes the best way to want to stay in it forever."
Evenings go to wherever just opened. Her current obsession is Sant Ambroeus. Girls' dinners at Faubourg D'Aimant (with margaritas, always). Full indulgence means Les Petits Commines.
Running underneath all of this: a personal side quest to try every independent cinema in Paris. Her eternal favorites are La Filmothèque du Quartier Latin and Christine 21. When she isn't there, she's at the Comédie-Française, Théâtre Édouard VII, or at the opera: Théâtre des Champs-Élysées or Garnier.
And if the next day allows it, the night ends at Experimental Cocktail Club and TAR.
"Every trip unlocks new parts of who we are."
Eva speaks about travel and work the way you speak about something that has changed you before you noticed it happening.
La Reunion, Eva's secret escape
She describes two kinds of trips. The ones that inspire: everything photographed, every museum visited, paper guides still folded at the bottom of the bag. And then the journeys that harden you. The Vatican galleries, completely empty, ten years ago. A skydive over La Réunion, three years ago. "These experiences nourish the soul and the body in completely different ways, yet in ways that complement each other."
Her work is artistic, and travel feeds it; but it also toughens her in the way running something of your own demands, in ways Paris itself, she says, could never fully understand.
And then the weeks end. The taxi crosses back into the city. The buildings pass by the window.
Everyone, she says, agrees on this one thing: nothing feels quite like that ride home.
