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Untitled
2002
80 x 80 cm
Ron
Sluik |
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Guilty
Landscapes
I was happy to meet a girl I could expect
not to be there (anymore).
Last November, as a Dutch artist living in Moldova, I went for
a few days with my friend Victor Gutu and two other painters
to a little picturesque Moldovan village called Butuceni, about
30 kilometers north of the capitol Chisinau. They were going
to paint in the open air, an activity I've never experienced.
I decided to join them, to have some rest, escape the city,
enjoy the last good weather of the year and maybe to make some
photos on the way for the photobook I am working on entitled
Это Мой Дом
- Жестокий Рай
or This is my House - the cruel paradise.
The village is extremely beautiful, situated on a peninsula
at the bottom of a canyon carved into the earth through a million
years by the river Raut. The local houses are made out of mud
and wood, colourfully painted in bright blue or green with hand
carved decorations of flowers and birds everywhere. You might
not believe it but this place once used to be a centre of the
world! The area is an important archaeological and geological
location: nearby you can find the leftovers of a Mongolian settlement,
the ruins of a Turkish bathhouse, the caves of early Christian
monks. There is even a cave-church still in use and in summertime
there are butterflies of all kinds everywhere. I'm pretty sure
this place, if situated for instance 30 kilometers north of
my former habitat Amsterdam, would be a major tourist attraction
like cheesetown Edam... but it isn't. It is just another village
of thousands in this young and poor country of the former Soviet
Union. A sandy road goes through it and about every 300 meters
there is a well - no running water in the houses. Mainly elderly
people live in the little farms with a garden in the backyard
where they grow the essential things they need. Some vegetables,
corn and potatoes, a small vineyard, a few chickens around the
house... and there are small children who are looking after
the few cows in the fields or the geese along the riverbanks.
In the village there's a shop and a bar for sugar, salt, matches
and vodka, the things that do not grow in a garden. On the surface
it all looks like a happy and self-supporting system, an economy
without need of money, but somehow something in these surroundings
is missing. Then you realise that you hardly see any adults
between 20 and 50. They are working somewhere else: some in
Chisinau, but most further away as seasonal workers, cheap or
illegal, in Russia or in the west to keep their families alive
in this cruel paradise they were once born. While the painters
put their easel on a romantic spot on the edge of the village
near the ravines and the river I decide to take a walk to the
highest point overlooking the area. The weather is perfect in
early November and the sky is blue. And while I climb, following
a goat's track and imagining I am all alone on the planet, I
find on top of the hill a girl, holding a pink mobile telephone,
calling an outside world. I am in love with her colors. I ask
her: Do not run away, please stay. She stays, at least for this
photo.
Ron Sluik, 22 January 2003 Chisinau.
Ron
Sluik
Artist based in Amsterdam, Holland and Chisinau, Moldava
sluik@gmx.net |
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Thnking
in Exile
Suzana Milevska
I live, I dwell means the same as I am... Philosophical
ideas connecting ourselves and our living spaces.
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