Der Beitrag Polly’s Playground erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Fifteen years ago, my sister and I immigrated to the Netherlands to be able to survive. Last summer our dear mother became ill. Our father, who shares his life with another woman, concluded: “Now you really have to come back home.” A friend of mine reacted with the words: “Maybe that’s why your mother is ill, because you left her alone.” To make up for the gap that opened in her life, my mother surrounded herself with animals rescued from the street. For her, they are my brothers and sisters. She says: “When you live with animals, you become one”, or, “I am half-animal and they – half-human.” Plants are also her passion, when no one else is around.

This project is a portrait of my homeland, Bulgaria, and my mother, at the same time. I am also asking from the position of a migrant what the moral relationship between me and my parents and homeland is; what it means to come back home; and where is home.

Der Beitrag The Queen of the Animals and the Most Beautiful Gardens erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Landscapes and bodies – these are two subjects that recur constantly in the work of Julie van der Vaart. Her photographic archive contains innumerabe monochrome series of nudes and romantic vistas, from which she can continually compile new series. Whether a photo was taken yesterday or two years ago is immaterial. The temporal dimension has recently started playing a greater part in her work. Inspired by theories of non-linear time, astrophysics and quantum mechanics, she has begun experimenting in the darkroom. For the “Beyond Time” series, she manually processed her photos with chemicals to produce bodies that seem to dissolve into the cosmos, simultaneously appearing and disappearing. A photo is prosaically a record of the past, but now it remains eternally afloat in imaginary time. — Merel Bem

Der Beitrag Beyond Time erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Read more about this publication in an essay written by Ruth Millington: Vistas of The Sublime.

Der Beitrag Mountains, Waves and Skies erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Der Beitrag IRIS Number 3: Very violet erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Der Beitrag IRIS Number 2: Jolly Joey erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

Der Beitrag IRIS Number 1: Above the clouds erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.

The operation the goddesses Juno and Iris perform is a transformation (an abstraction) – from the globe of the eye (from bulbus oculi) to a pattern of plumage, from the organ of sight to an ornament (to illustration). A symbolic transplantation, taxidermy of a concept. By making the peacock the lasting bearer of the notion of Argos’ multi-ocular gaze, Juno maintains Argos’ legacy. It is without doubt the many-eyed Argos (the Panoptes – the All-Seeing) who, by his surveying gaze, is enabled to gain an exhaustive conception of an image of the world.

With reference to the latest theory of colour introduced by his contemporary Franciscus Aguilonius, Rubens based his allegory of seeing – and notably Iris’ accompanying rainbow – on a blue-red-yellow colour scheme. Aguilonius – otherwise known as Francois d’Aguilon – was a Brussels-born jesuit mathematician, a physicist and architect, the author of a six-volume treatise on optics and active in Antwerp at the same time as Rubens. Rubens contributed the frontispieces and several illustrations to his ‘Six Books of Optics’. In his comprehensive study Aguilonius explicates, inter alia, the principles of stereographic projection. Stereographic projection is a geometric function that projects a sphere onto a plane. It is used to make a coherent two-dimensional illustration from the three-dimensional thing – such as a map from the terrestrial globe. — SH

Der Beitrag Plants and Soil erschien zuerst auf malenki.net.