Balance

Edges merging, the island between the Black Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Essay by Bogdan Ghiu (Slopes of the same spring) Mircea Sorin Albuțiu is a photographer and artist-researcher from Central and South-Eastern Europe who travels incessantly, practicing, exploring and experimenting with the forms of road photography, with the relationship between photography and lived space, space which is worked upon, produced, taken over by people: space-history. Places and their people, the people of places – or how space becomes place and path. In all of his projects, the camera does not just “catch” and capture images, but enters into a relationship, inserts itself, “devices itself”, engages existentially, vitally, with places and roads, in other words, with the people who civilize the space which, as such, is a desert in itself, a non-place (cf. Marc Augé). Photography becomes one with the place: it becomes the place itself. Albuțiu proceeds through montages practiced as super-images of “synthesis”, the resulting hyper-image becoming a symesthesia-synthesis of careful and inspired, extremely precise joinings and pairings. Symbolic maps with faces and landscapes, in which the countries are in fact (through a vertical “montage” between stairs, this time, completing the first in a cross shape) the faces of people and the faces of places. Photography as a meeting place. In this project, the photographer-traveler pauses on a peak or more precisely on an ideal and imaginary, intellectual and experimental crest, a topos atopos of his career, which we must already speak of in terms of work, and a supreme place of vision, that is, a point of visualization for an idea and a spirit of the place: at the crossroads of waters, of the great and small waters of that hyper-place which is Europe. Defining Europe as a crossroads of waters, as a crossroads from where the falsely divergent destinies of this ideal, synthetic place spring, flowing and flowing. What is Europe? A balance. A balance of waters, towards East and towards West, a balance now, once again, in a balance of its history. The European history (as it is: crisscrossed, zigzagging west-east, “W-eastern”) of the Romanian word cumpănă arrived in Romanian on the shores of the old Slavic noun kopana, it seems, from Campania, like balanță and clopot, campana. The richness of the European hydrographic basin (with its alluvium hailing from all parts) of the European-Romanian word cumpănă, seems to me to best define this project-poem: a mass scale, a traditional mechanism for extracting the phreatic water that unites us, from wells, but also in concentric circles, as I said, weighing up and keeping the balance (like Europe is doing now) despite feelings of disorientation — as we are all doing are across the world in this new moment of history. Thus, let us do the work of weighing in order not to let ourselves grow disoriented from the flow of our common, shared history — diverted from the course of our history. Europe: a cumpănă — or a balance (of waters), a balance (equilibrating, weighing, judging) found and placed in the balance. A balanced balance. On his panels or boards – in which we must perceive hyper-images (of intellectual synthesis, therefore more related to the regime of vision than just that of sight: in the case of an artist, a photographer, you need vision to see and to be able to be seen), hyper-images intended for the supreme metaphorical visualization of a hyper-place. The artist balances East and West, recreating Europe as an ideal archi-place. He glues, joins, juxtaposes, places in contiguity, creates ideal neighbors, and, by way of communication, places and brings people of those places located at the edges face to face, at the natural limits of the continent, where land does not end but flows aquatically into the sea and the ocean. These are two edges of Europe, two of its geographical “extremes”, located at the confluence of waters into the great planetary waters, where Europe continues, on and like water, in the world: the Rio Lis from Portugal into the Atlantic Ocean and the Danube into the Black Sea, through its great Delta. The Danube, Europe’s river par excellence, is more European than other European rivers (than the Rhine or the Rhone, for example), given that it crosses and unites Europe across borders (and thus is often politically instrumentalized as a border), defining it and fixing it — if only through the great capitals that emerged and grew on its banks. The situation of the Danube (which is the ancient Istria) for Europe as a defining place, precisely through its (im)balance, has already made it (as we remember, we must remember) the “object” of an interrogation, not incidentally poetic to the extreme, of the great and absolute German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who, in his great poem-hymn precisely titled thus, Der Ister (The Istria), meaning “The East”, reflects that “Yet the river almost seems/To flow backwards, and I/Think it must come/From the East./Much could/Be said further” (trans. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover). Much, indeed, could be said about this situation, the geographical contradiction serving precisely as a definition for for Europe. (And there is still much to be said – and has been said, but I won’t repeat what here – about the interpretation to which Martin Heidegger subjected the great Hölderlinian poem in 1942, an interpretation that itself seems to go the other way, turning as per the logic of rivers.) In Europe, rivers flow the other way, crisscrossed and in chiasmus, East is West and West becomes East, in the sense that rivers are roads but also, alas, borders to be crossed. From Central and South-Eastern Europe, Mircea Sorin Albuțiu tells us, therefore, that Europe is in itself and as such central, a crossroads of waters and roads, an ideal peak of balance, of balancing East-West, West-East, the great, archetypal poetic lesson of its emblematic river is of flow in reverse and in fact of cross-wise flow, completing a process of Europe’s historical birth (through incessant invasions and permanent nomadism), from East to West, through the reverse flow of its tutelary river. Junction, an ideal point of intersection and balance, of crossroads – of all-encompassing, global vision, demonstrated by the present project-poem meta-shows –, not only horizontally, but also vertically, between up and down, between elevated and lowered: a single fountain spreading its waters in balance, temperate, waters pouring down slopes symbolically and thus embracing land. But the vertical balance of springs as well, as mentioned, which rise to draw water from the depths. The waters of Europe flowing in reverse and thus intertwining mark and embody the immaterial and purely spiritual line which delimits in order to connect photographs from two ends of Europe that compose Albuțiu’s hyper-images, the two plates of the European basin and the two terms of the metaphor in action that is Europe, the continent-myth, the continent-poem. Chiasmus, χιασμός, khiasmós, khi, X, cross, intersection. Rarely have I encountered such a profoundly European project as this on my crisscrossed, winding, W-Eastern European roads. What does this project show us? Through its connecting compositions, that make the East osmotically embrace the West in liquid, as two sides of the same medal (and not just coins)? Differences, but also similarities, identities and contrasts, but nothing extreme, limit, radical, even if hailing from extreme conditions. People’s faces. Gazing at the images, we might speak of a European people, a European tribe rather than a river, a here or there (groundwater feeding the surface streams) of the national borders which anti-European, identitarian tensions sometimes cling to, and which in turn freeze the fluvial flows in the form of mineralized and dried-up identities (be it pond or lake, for Europe knows no inland seas). The meeting of edges and the “margins” of Europe: the inhabits of these images and of these non-limiting limits, gates and thresholds of Europe, could very easily exchange places, following the lesson of the great Istria-Danube River. The rivers of Europe define the Old Continent in a greater capacity, more efficiently, more generously, more universally than the dry lands they traverse, irrigate, and fertilize. Waters set land in motion. The waters of Europe, the rivers and inland streams and the seas and oceans that send it out into the world, balance out Europe, diluting a territorial and chthonic — and thus morbid and maniacal — vision of a dry and static Europe. Both a reverie and a journey, the present project, supremely representative as it is for Europe, proves not only visual, but downright visionary. By offering a visual metaphor of Europe, this isthmus crushed between the great Asia and the great Ocean might prove itself a Noah’s Ark, inviting us to a reversal in perspective (like the Danube that flows in reverse), plunging us in a state of dreaming and revisiting Europe as a united archipelago of lands, bound together by its large and little flowing waters that redefine it not so much as a Continent, but as a Great Island in A Middle between seas and oceans (dry land in the environment of waters). It is thus a true Copernican reversal of the (ego-geo-centered) vision of Europe, from its waters to its land, in harmony with predominantly aquatic realities themselves, open to the future of the Earth. Travel photography – through which the inhabitants of the nodal point where two European waters meet in the planetary sea and ocean send postcards to themselves, looking at each other and seeing each other together, reunited – becomes a journey and encounter.