Săgeată, floare, foc

The fall of a meteor is an event that captured the imagination and thrilled the history since the beginning of humanity, and that was fully understood only in the recent history. What used to predict calamities for the common folk and troubled the minds of thinkers, in the present is tracked, studied and kept in museums and private collections.

This work is an attempt to visually approach an astronomical phenomena that strongly influenced the Romanian poetry and art in general, and was the leitmotif of the most famous national poem.

Being interested in apparently boring landscapes that have a hidden aura, with the help of a database offered by The Metoritical Society, in 2018 I started to search the locations where meteorites fell in Romania. Almost all the sites that I visited so far, where the impact was still remembered by the locals, hold some reference to the event. This occurrence is even more charming knowing its power to feed local myths. Most of the people that I’ve met, that had nothing to do with the phenomenon, wanted to be integrated in the story, to be part of this cosmic venture. But for the ones in whose yard the meteorite fell, this gift became a burden. This encounter reflects the human need to overcome oneself, and once it happened, leaves an open space that need to be filled again.

Oscillating between facts and fictions, my perception on this work changed in time. What started as a documentary approach, slowly shifted to a desire to present a personal interpretation on the subject. Willing to keep the character of this unpredicted event, I embraced technical errors and made interventions on the film, searching for unexpected.

* The title of the work translates as Arrow, flower, fire and it is a verse from Celestial touch, poem written by Lucian Blaga, in 1933