PLACES OF STILLNESS

For most of my life, I have been afraid or avoiding darkness...the real one as well as the imagined one, the one of the night as well as the one of the spirit.

However, it was just three times in my life when the emotion I felt in the darkness was so overwhelming that it surpassed the fear. There were three moments when I have seen the Milky Way very clearly. There were three very different places - very different moments of my life - yet they were connected through the same kind of powerful feeling.

(2000- 2001)
The first time, I was on the top of a high cliff of the Adirondacks Mountains.

It was the closest to the feeling of sublime among all. Probably the same feeling Caspar David Friedrich evokes in his painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

Yet, in my situation, it was extremely dark on the earth. No human dwellings nearby to throw some homes lightly. You could hear only the sounds of the forest, caused by the movements of small animals that were living around. The fulness and roundness of the darkness had some very still quality.

I felt peace mixed with fear in a very unlikely kinship. Time had frozen for a moment, when neither what happened before, nor what will happen mattered, or at least seemed to be irrelevant.

The Milky Way spilled its white light above my head. Nothing else was present anymore for a moment or two.

Nebuleuse de la Lyre, Paul Henry, 1885
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, www.metmuseum.org.

(2005)

After a couple of years, I was in a Tibetan area of the Amdo province. I was walking in a line of people. We were finding our way through the darkness of a long road from the margins of a village, at almost 3000m altitude. It was a winter without too much snow, yet chilly. The darkness was so deep that while I was trying to watch my feet not stumble through a hole in the ground, I wasn't able to see anything. I could just feel the movement of my body and hear the others' voices that made me feel reassured that I wasn't completely lonely and lost. At some point, I have entrusted my feet with the knowledge that they will follow the path on the ground by themselves and turned my gaze towards the sky. It was there again: the same Milky Way, as clear as before, like a long road, spread over the sky.

I do not recall if I could see the moon as well, yet I was quite sure that, even if on earth all was covered with darkness, somewhere above, a light was shining.

(I turned my face up and down a couple of times and continued the way towards the house in the night, alongside my companions.)

Later, I found this poem I resonate with, and it seemed to be quite related to that situation. "... you walk
happy in no longer fearing mud, rain, nowhereness or night,
not looking for any window, yet indescribably certain

that the lighted window is there, that you'll make it out
however bowed your head, or tight-shut your eyes --- and besides
you keep your head held right, exposed to the rain, and your eyes wide open." Yannis Ritsos, in "Winter Clarity", 1972
(translated by Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley)

(2007- 2008)

The third time I was in Sinaia, a small city of the Bucegi Mountains. This time, there were a couple of small lights of the city, while I was going on the street towards home. The snow barely allowed me to make a path. The sight of the Milky Way light was an unexpected gift.

The silence outside and the stillness of mind merged. The sky was like the surface of a still lake in the middle of the night. The Milky Way was shining in silence.

The movement was absorbed by the snow, while a feeling of tranquility emerged. I was part of that night mountain landscape and that was enough for me.

(2019)

I had to create an installation for the Cuhnia place of the Mogoșoaia Palace. That architectural monument place used to have a hearth in the middle, where the fire was not lit anymore. It impressed me as a place of darkness, despite the beautiful brick walls and cupola that were still there.

I searched for a historical story that would evoke me the same feeling about darkness, that merged the ridiculous with the sublime. I found it and struggle to recover at least a bit from its touching, human quality.

It was a story of people who were evoking images in front of empty frames.

The situation could have been dramatic, ridiculous, or even mad. It wasn't. What made it redeeming?

The power of storytelling together with people's willingness to view imagined landscapes and people.

It happened during the Second World War in the Ermitage Museum, in Sankt Petersburg. Some soldiers were asked by the custodians to help remove the canvases of the precious paintings out of their museum frames, to remove and protect them from destruction. After they accomplished their task, one of the employees of the museum had the idea to thank them by giving them a guided tour through the Flemish department rooms, telling them stories about the removed paintings. That custodian evoked each painting from the room through skillful storytelling based on his visual memory. That story sparked a dialogue about the absent paintings.

I was mind-mapping the elements of that situation: the storyteller, the absent images, and... the stars. I found a relevant quote from Emerson: "when it is dark enough, you can see the stars".

A mixture between real information, historically loaded place, and personal significant stories and imagery have created a fabric of textile sculptures and meaning, enough as to hold the quest for meaningful experiences of people. It was a matter of describing the texture of that darkness, a darkness that may shut us up, but also which brings that particular stillness that allows the stars to shine for us.

THAY

A SAND TRAIL