Triggered by rupture
I'm from salty hair strings play hide and seek with sea gods
Tease the wind with my child's laughter
I'm from sips of crystallised sunshine
Chew the crispness of a mountain spring
I'm from bruise-my-knees with desire to climb trees
Stain cherry finger tips with more
I'm from sticky wetness of a long day play Kids roam free
I'm from meadows pregnant with St. John worth, thyme, yarrow and drunken bees
Lay down - straw is taller than me
I'm from under the shadow of burdock leaves - sole spectator of a dancing river
I'm from over there, on the other side, a block away, up on the hill
I'm from silent summer nights breathing fireflies - the mountain wears a starry hat
I'm from that
I am from
am I
Interconnection allows exchange of information but we are born through rupture.
I was 17 when I got on the plane for my first transatlantic journey. To only imagine how my umbilical cord was starting to slowly loose leverage, and I would soon burst away in space like a balloon. What I didn't know was that the feeling of displacement and uprootedness would awake a critical survey of the reality I was born and brought up in.
Besides all of the shortcomings of being called literally an alien on your own planet, gratitude found me dwelling in the opportunity to write my own story. For two years, I worked, studied and wrote. Then, I went back to see my family in Bulgaria where the old saying - one can never go in the same river twice - unraveled.
My travels between the two continents turned into a major matrix for mindful learning. I rediscovered place and identity through an emerging quest for belonging and contesting of meaning. In that space, cultural, ecological and historical values were constantly negotiated. At the same time, to develop a global perspective was a copying mechanism of survival beyond personal expression. While the opportunity to reevaluate and reconstruct an authentic place emanated from the praxis of place-making and brewed into a deep sense of empowerment.
Environmental Psychologist Lynne C. Manzo says that,
place disruption can make explicit the bonds between person and location that are typically latent.
Indeed, the first time I critically thought of a place was when I experienced the confusion of displacement. I appreciated the shortcomings of the old ways and the smallest deeds that I could only encounter in the simplicity of my home country.
Scarred with the constant fluctuation of interconnection and rupture, it took years to distill my memories to what the landscape architect Claire Cooper-Marcus calls a psychic anchor. Down to the uninterrupted outdoor play, to that moment when reverence first imprints its blessing onto the connective tissue of the heart.
These very experiences of place have shaped a “carnal response” to nature and have awaken a deep sense of empathy and interconnectedness with the world, which now generate my process investigations. A rootedness which allows the trans-cultured self to claim home an abstract sense of inner security, as ephemeral as it could be, in the continuous creation of belonging and place. Hester writes that,
childhood landscapes, home place experiences and passages provide foundations for sacredness either through symbolism or synesthesia.
Likewise, twenty years later displacement and uprooting continue to mould my creative process into an intense self-inquiry, investigating positionality within the immediacy of my physical and psychological environments. New meaning takes place through the exploration of tension and integrity, creating an empathic response in the body. While rupture lives in the formal aesthetic, in the cracks of my process as a nonalignment of genesis.
An active observation of dynamic relationships in places of contact, break and imprint, this process challenges perfection, noticing the broken, discarded, decaying and embracing its beauty as a source of emergence. It feeds on the thrill of transformation. Less interested in resolutions but rather driven by the deep inquiry into what builds and deconstructs the environment, and the relationships it creates. This process is sensitive to any occurrences on the edge where nature-made and human-made meet each other holding a mirror question:
where are you from?
References
Manzo, L. C. & Devine-Wright, P. (2019).“Place Attachment.” In Steg, L., Van den Berg, A. Andde Groot, J. (Eds.) Environmental Psychology: An Introduction. (2nd Edition). Chichester, West Sussex: BPS Blackwell.
Cooper Marcus, C. (1992). “Environmental memories”. In I. Altman & S. Low (Eds). Place Attachment. New York: Plenum Press.
Hester, R. (2014). “Do not detach!: Instructions from and for Community Design” In L.C. Manzo and P. Devine-Wright (eds.). Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Application. (pp.s 191-206). London: Routledge.
