Darwin’s Nightmare (Bat and Hanging Pitcher Plant)

“Wilderness is, for example, when you don’t have a mirror for several days and you realise yourself only through physical feelings – hunger or cold. You sleep where the tiredness finds you. The basic feelings of the world. Nobody is watching. Wilderness is an enchantment and a mythical concept from a mythical country which does not exist anymore. Wilderness is a desire, a dream about the world before an ecological catastrophe that we are starting to be aware of. We think of it with awe and we wish to enter it, we search for it on our ways, and we try to get to the end of the earth, where a part of wilderness is perhaps still hidden. Wilderness is also painting with a head torch in a several days lasting rain and fog, at the most rainy place of the world. Wilderness is to be able to do exactly what you desire to do.

My current pictures are telling stories of places, people, animals, or plants that I met on my travels. Sometimes, the stories intertwine, as I move. Memories blend together and interweave. Town with nature, one country with another… apart from my subjective, but mostly real experience, the picture is penetrated by ecological or social topics. I retell the heard stories and look for people’s relationships to the place that I am speaking about. It is perhaps like that wilderness – a place that we long to see, but which is nothing but a dream now. Also my pictures are kind of dreams or memories of the world, visual poems composed of real words connected into a big mental map.” J. M.

Alexandra Tamásová ● Do divočiny