Yesterday's talk about Parajanov chaired by Vigen Galastyan showed that the interpretation, which is always risky, opens up a work of art and so maintains its timeliness. Ashik Kerib could be a hieroglyph filled by a secret meaning, but it could also be merely a show for the eyes, a return to the cinema's first things when the illusion of an image was leading on the sight that was following. Today, Parajanov's film could be understood in many ways, the fluency of the film is particularly striking together with its queer aspect as not only does it put a male in the centre of the longing but it also breaks into pieces the idea of what is and what isn't authentic. The surface of the image thickens from transformations, bodies, symbols and movements flow, changing the form, direction of each film frame. We were further led towards this polyphony of the Black Sea by the story of Magda Nowakowska and Raphael Roginskii: Ashikhs and the eternal circle of spiritual travel, mystical circles of trance, ecstasy, were becoming part of the memory of the borderland for us. Following the pathways of music and poetry, the earth casts away the borderlines and, just like in the sufi saying of wisdom, it sprawls and completely blends with the sky out there on the horizon. The point here is not a distant, foreign wisdom, but our common source, a forgotten tradition of meeting which established Central Europe and the Caucasus region in their connection to the East. A grand, monolithic history talks about it in a different way – and this was the main issue in another film that we watched together, Will There Be a Theratre Up There by Nana Janelidse. In this film a biographical memory of the family of a famous Georgian actor, Kakhy Kavasadse, and therefore the memoyr of Georgia with its borderland, was juxtaposed with the empire spectacle of time, border and map. Yesterday, 24 August was the Independence Day in Ukraine, so we celebrated it in the White Synagogue. The evening was divided into two parts. We began by commemorating Victoria Amelina and Maxim Kryvtsov, the poets murdered by the Russians, taken away by the war raging in Ukraine. With their poems in our heads we took part in the second part of the evening, which was the concert of music that Maciej Rychły composed to the poems of the poet, Grigori Skovoroda. This concert was another tale about travelling and to a very large extent reminded of raw rituals, its trance-like, ritualistic rhythm purified us in a way and, at the same time it enabled us to put in order our thoughts from the last few days and to recall the war in Ukraine.
tekst: Piotr Szroeder
translation from polish: Paweł Rogala
