PORTFOLIO MONIKA BULAJ

Transcription

1 PORTFOLIO MONIKA BULAJ

2 A journey back in time along the path of the early Christians; a travel with a notebook and a camera in search of a possible cohabitation between East and West, different cultures and religions, Islam and Judaism, in places where monotheisms in conflict elsewhere generate surprising areas of cohabitation AURAS: WHEN THE SACRED CROSSES BOUNDARIES Text and photos by There are places and moments in which the sacred crosses boundaries; places and moments in which the tension in the atmosphere runs high, in which the people of the Book Jews, Christians and Muslims reveal their common belonging. It is present in the roar of the faithful repeating the same prayer, or the passage from the exterior of a sacred place to its interior. You see it on the border between shadow and light, in dances that are rhythmic to the extent of putting the dancers into a trance, in crowds that sway like an expanse of algae in the sea, in the contact between bodies or between bodies and relics. You sense it when passing through over-crowded or perfectly empty spaces, in the laments, the sighs, the genuflections, the recitations of rosaries: places, gestures, clothing, lights and paths that unveil the analogies among the monotheisms and demonstrate all the power of a single Word. Atmosphere, I said earlier. In Greek and Latin, wrote Ellemire Zolla, one speaks of fascination as if it were a breeze, an aura that emanates from a people or a place and sometimes grows into a whirlwind, a rain cloud, a dazzling cloud, a golden reflection that floods and dazes. In this book, I would like to describe the auras I have experienced among the people of the Book and the only God; the auras Muslims call ahel el katab. It is not analogies of choreography and movement I wish to describe, but rather atmospheric similarities. I wish to make people understand that the emotion communicated by a crowd that sways and breathes in unison in an Orthodox church full of candles is very similar to the emotion one might feel in a temple full of Sufi mystics in Istanbul or during a Hasidic Jewish ritual. The calendar of my travels between Gibraltar and Persia an agenda that I fine-tune year after year follows the chosen hours, the birth and death anniversaries of saints and prophets, and unveils a pattern of surprising parallels. Elijah becomes Khidr the green for Muslims; St George on horseback is celebrated in the Balkans by Christians and Muslims alike; Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Neapolitan and Istanbul women gather around the Virgin Mary. And then there are the celebrations of the ascension of the Son of God into the sky, the ascension of barefoot Armenians on their knees to the summit of the mountain darkened by the smoke of candles, fertility and death celebrations, and festivities Gypsy, Persian or Jewish to mark the end and the beginning of the year. A close inspection will reveal that the calendar of festivities follows the same rhythms of the eternal return in the three religions of the Book: the Sun, the Moon, the seasons, the seven years, the 40 days, with the preceding night often being more important than the feast itself. The Armenian and Turkish women who read the future in dreams while sleeping on a prophet s tomb on the Bosporus, for example, are absolutely similar to the Russian female pilgrims crouched in the dark with candles next to the relics of a saint on the Carpathian mountains, or the Tuareg women dressed in festive clothing in a night of prayer on the sacred graves of the desert. When I choose the strongest, most mysterious moments of the calendar that I have experienced, I realise not only that they cross the fences 148

3 built by priests and theologians, but also that the succession of these events reveals a solid and coherent ensemble, a continuity we have forgotten how to observe, conditioned as we are by the superficial impression of the cataclysm today we would say clash of civilizations that divides us. This is also true for places. If they are sacred, they are sacred for everyone. In the same way, a good saint is good for everyone, not to mention the gestures of prayer, the use of the body as a means to communicate with the Elsewhere. The body contains the secret of collective memory. The body does not lie. The sacred passes through and pierces the body. There is no evidence, in these archaic gestures, of the terrible history of forced conversions in articulo mortis or the conversions extorted at the tip of a sword under the shadow of the crescent moon: rather, one interprets the arcane wisdom of the people, the search for freedom through the learned use of the senses for example, the mechanical repetition of a single phrase until the meaning of the words is lost and it is the repetition itself that opens the doors of the heavens to you. In sum, I follow the mystery of passionate devotion stamped by the official culture as devotio stulta, unreasonable devotion: i.e. popular, folkloristic or exalted; the manifestation of faith by illiterates and idiots, mystics and poets, saints and the illiterate, those whom I call people of God the nepioi of the Gospel, the poor of spirit. Then there is the Book: the foundation of the Christian faith, the cult object handed down by generations, stubbornly defended in the hard times of persecution; adorned with pearls, saved from burning, scraped away from the ice and even hidden in basements. Or the book of the Muslims which, inversely, may never touch the ground; a book that is studied starting from the end, with the clearest concepts in its final suras that open up the road to the difficult beginning. And then the Talmud, with its incredible calligraphy and border of annotations, a text that circles another text, frames and envelops it. A labyrinth of meanings in which unlike the Koran every single word, every infinitesimal inscription must be buried for the word, like Man, requires a funeral. And then there are the prayers of the Tartars, written on folded pages and slipped into the earth of the cemetery so that the dead may hear their whisper. There is the book of the fleeing Armenians, hidden in cracks in the rock, stained with blood, buried in the ground like the flags of armies, tiny as stamps or enormous trunks of knowledge and calligraphic art, the most precious possession, saved from massacres and carried away on the shoulders like those of two old women through the deserts of Anatolia to the safe mountains of the Caucasus. The Book of books, written not by God but by men who listened to angels, men certain of having heard the Word in the midst of many other words; the prophetic Word that inhabits the soul and then grows, pulls along with it. The conscience that, thrown open for an instant, produces fear, fever, ecstasy or madness, as when an illiterate shepherd Mohammed heard the words of an angel in the dark and was able to dictate them out loud in a strong voice. That, too, is an aura a millenary one, elusive and unmistakeable. 149

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14 ADV