Russia

We just returned from a ten day trip to the heart of Russia. It was refreshing to be confronted with that otherness of a different culture, a different way of experiencing life. 

I give some impressions of places which attracted me:

These wooden houses awakend memories, visions and dreams I have captured a couple of years ago, lying on the edge of my awareness. It was as if whispering voices told me what has happened there in times past by. Like when you wake up in the morning after a dream and part of it you remmber and part of it quickly slips away.

This looks like an embodiement of an imaginary reality. It was a great place to observe the meeting of cultures and the "in between place" of east and west.

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This shows the clash of the dreamworld and everyday reality, which sometimes looks a bit threatening.
As I feel it, it is as if there is something hanging in the air which might quickly transform this holographic illussion into a new image, maybe better, maybe not better but definitely different. 

Often I felt like being in different realities at the same time.

And often I was remembered of the great Russian literature, the vastness of everyhting, the landscape, the depth of emotions, the complexity of human relations, the multigenerational family dramas taking place in very different parts of the world, and all of it observed and experienced with so much telling details. It touched my heart.

That great capacity to be very precise in observations was remarkable in paintings in musea as well.

There is no need for reforestation in Russia, plenty of wildness and forests and no private ownership of nature. It did place some questionmarks by my recent projects and concerns. Tough climate change is there also clearly observable. 

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