GEOGRAPHY OF WATER 01 issuu

Iordanis Stylidis

the Geography of Water NEPAL • SIKKIM(INDIA) • BAHREIN • UNITED ARAB EMIRATES • DARJELING(INDIA) • EDESSA(HELLAS) • ATHENS • THESSALONIKI(HELLAS) • RILLA(BULGARIA) • BIRATNAGAR(INDIA) • KALINPONG(INDIA)• GANGTONG(INDIA) • SILIGURI(NEPAL) • PATAN(NEPAL) • ROUMTEK(NEPAL) • PELLIN(NEPAL) • HAMA(SYRIA) • AL RAKA (SYRIA)

ιδεολογική και στοχαστική οδοιπορία a crossing through ideals and contemplation Κείμενο έκθεσης της πράξης της μηχανοκίνητης και της ασκητικής οδοιπορίας στην Άπω Ανατολή

A text regarding the context of crossing concepts and elements in the Far East

© Foteini Adrimi, Basel, Switzerland

Iordanis Stylidis collective voyages, meaning variations, cities of meditation Water. A natural element as well as an important, life enclosing word that marks a new plateau of related ideals and general experience. That word is nowadays bound to odd, common experiences, concepts and symbols that it carries, directing and unleashing all familiar folds of reality.

It carries us away towards a clear moment of instant bonding, that is triggered every time water runs through our fingers. It contains an entire experience as it fills and regulates the body, driving a frantic search or bouncing of the skin. It defines a new liaison that yet once more will celebrate the existence and the intense connection it has with the observer, the handler, the one who is dedicated to the water’s redeeming nature.

Copalpur - North East India

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Š Foteini Adrimi, Basel, Switzerland

Iordanis Stylidis • 2015

Cities, Travells and Meaning At some point the journey we are drifting whithin starts shifting…

We are no longer following a formality, we do not hope to meet what you have already seen in pictures, what we have already sorted into a strict group of preconceptions.

The entire route is a plateau of associations where the details and their systematic sequence branches out creating infinite events, details, observations, altering a multiplicity of mysterious and undefined scouting tactics. Time is no longer defined by day and night, nor do day and night get defined by time; weather phenomena are more intense than usual. The shape, the folding of the ground and the presence of life, present properties that outline new and foreign rituals of living.

• Collections of landscape formations and details of direct experience that get sorted away neatly and just accumulate, lose their inner structure, thus lose their meaning.

Their pieces shift to cover the characteristics and interpretations of other, until recently firm, plateau of ideas. Those pieces lose their space and time dimensions and quickly transform into independent generators of meaning… parts of a constructed and defined connection, of a system of values, they gain centrifuge, condensing their own meaning, collecting fast and easy portions without checking on their truth, avoiding to complete the circle of meaning, exposing it, dissolving it and recreating it with every new stimulation.

• The first moments of the experience are dramatic… there is nothing to support the newborn reality … a constant tension undermines the great system of experiences that guided life. If you step back and get hooked on the old system of values then everything stops… we are keep looking, keep desiring and accepting what we excpect…

NEPAL - PASUPANITATH • RITUALS When we rise and observe the squares of the far East… When we walk distant and narrow paths… When our mind accepts and stacks neatly away the power of a short lasting sense of fulfillment… The moment when all infinite details and optic impressions tie with one another, getting multiplied and amplified, they show us that a diversified life and the pleasures of its manifestations is identical to the life we have been trained to consider as rough, denied of leisure , seen as a mixture of difficulties… then we remain in this big square, we rest our eyes and what few objects we carry from our journey on some surface and we try to keep up, start learning the first words of this place, get lost in a universe of discussions and wishes.

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© Foteini Adrimi, Basel, Switzerland

SIKKIM (INDIA) • LANDSCAPES The endless number of pictures, the wishes, the advices already given to be followed. The feeling aroused due to the powerful propositions send with passion and enthusiasm from those who constantly travel and, thus, manage to erase their identity. Those who are nameless and lost, escaping from a reality already left behind. Who will feel the cold and the rain, flick the rain drops, wipe their sweat while crossing the deep and moist jungles, cover their tears while traveling into small wrecked vehicles taking them to the high up peeks lost into the fog.

Travel...travel...enter into the realm of experiences declaring the adventure and the tragedy of life...

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Š Foteini Adrimi, Basel, Switzerland

SIKKIM (INDIA) • HABITATS What and how much of it will soon offered to the body and the wild mind of the travelers. What and how much is needed to be tightly attached and deeply hide as to provide not the essential phrases, to build not a temporary bond with the place. Either with the use of words or under the suffering and the tears. Either running into the rain or looking at and reveal minor details forming the identity of the habitats offering no hospitality or a welcome ritual. Never appear and present in front of the eyes of a visitor. Always waiting to witness their dissapearance into their existence, to be unified.

Iordanis Stylidis • 2015

• If you accept the challenge, you have to look carefully and make assumptions in a new fashion, mixing the elements and information of any worth noticing construction, as well as make your own free associations on every feeble possibility, expecting a row of unrefined meanings, abandoning the obvious, choosing to receive and transmit signals of the orb in which the facts move.

• Soon and during a happy and inconstant life, chaotic structures start forming a new personalized system of values… what before was annoying, insulting and filling the trip with guilt now is organized and familiar.

•Travelling through facts … travelling where methods and rules do not define the experience, where all that is required is an advanced sense of acceptance, a rule of conduct and a system of values that is hinted and portrayed in the works, completed or insufficient, of travelers, painters, writers, ideologists, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, geographers, biologists and medics throughout the centuries…

• The value or random gatherings of experience as opposed to the obsession and the fixation on proving a preconceived notion. The value of connections and that of constructing observations that branch out into infinite subdivisions is the way to depict the dramatic transition of a place… pieces of a scientific discipline… materials defining an area of water... a system of random sounds that may carry a meaning or may undermine it all.

• When we travel our personal tensions and methods of living get triggered, emerging and colliding with each chance…

• We return without presents from our travels, without idealized reference protocols.

We are not directly form and narrate a meaning … we examine not the accuracy, the details of long engaged rituals, the technicalities necessary to restore a memory pocket… we protect not and doubt about the findings and the evidences treasured into a value oriented memory that is set upon controlling, classifying and discarding …

• That’s why those who can’t fit into the principles of a different sum of values, end up transferring piles of controversial information, lies and a constant guilt about their

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own life.. They are aware that no matter how far they may get to travel they will always gaze upon themselves, it is their self that will talk to them when they explore the horizon, when they sweat, deep in a jungle, when they feel crushed by the structure of an aloof urban landscape.

• In the great journey to Shikkim, such elements presented themselves, leading to arbitrary interpretations … because life there remained untouched, was not accessed by those who went through cities, to those who hiked, reaching for old monasteries, to those who took shelter to protect from the rain… all they got to do was observe and comment a detail or an act. A number of lies and uninspired observation that can support no greater meaning… elements about a house that appeared and disappeared fast, facts about the great water tanks and springs from which no water was taken, notes about the frozen water tanks , the sweat and dust during the noon…elements of storms and rivers, of tubs and how to clean the body… elements about the mythology of water.

• The mind was able to retain all those evidence, form them without order and create memories out of them.. no written record has been able to solidify what came to pass.. besides those worlds are absolutely imaginary .. distant.. almost not real … they cannot be proven. There are hundreds of pictures, tens of testimonies... “I was there, I saw” there are published texts… there are memorabilia… there are hidden memories.

None of that offers an exact testimony.

SIKKIM (INDIA), Darjeiling • MEMORIES Memories, scattered and unverified fragments of experience, flowing, randomly interconnecting to each other.

Disappointment, aroused due to the inherent weakness to build a robust orientation formed by ideal moments that will define an absolute exegesis (explanation) regarding the nessecity, the core meaning of the only and all voyages.

The ideal configuration that will give birth to an absolute locus (place) where tension, tiredness, frustration and disappointment... anger, desire and everything that finally match or repeled, deform and keep out of sight the major properties of the public self will finally meet ultimate reasoning and boldly facing it reform it to mental power...

How was I at that plateau of experiences? ..who was I? What was it formed of? ...which properties have I carried back? ...what was the nature of these spatial futures obscured by that great mnemonic distance? ...fading away ...weak and powerless, carrying not a bit of that past accumulated desire, that mnemonic outburst already cut off from all essential elements create its power. Somewhere, some distand morning, at the steep tea plantation slopes. Who was I then? what is the meaning of this picture representing self at a far away past? When are we going to travel together again? Following an insecure route, carrying no promices for a blissful return.

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In this book two forms of texts coexist and connect to the images. The linear narration, a chronological order of the places, connections and thoughts, acts as a machine that reveals the tensed line that tracks the eye of the narrator as it gazes back into what was and what contributed to this creation, along with any emotional additions that may have been placed there arbitrary, in the attempt of the author, the narrator to create something pleasurable that surpasses the experience of space and becomes an experience of text and images.

The second typo of texts are additions of small text-notes that have been documented during the travels and during many years later when the images were handled again and again, filling thoughts and senses and demanding that they travel from the writer to the ears of a worth listener and then to another, in a flow that will shatter the contents but will keep alive the flaming desire to meet places, travel, understand our world and comfort our fears.

This book is based on desire and most especially to that kind of desire that characterizes the travel of a team, the constant occurrence of a brief or longer dialog, sharing silence and time as in one moment it can stop and expand while the next one it can speed up and carry along all kinds of diversified thoughts.

The book is also based on the constantly asked, unanswered questions.

What do we do with what we gain in our travels?

Why is it that we accumulate in neurotic fashion pieces of images from the landscapes we visited?

Small or larger odd memories, unsorted little objects. What do we do with these quantities of objects, after we presented them the first or the second day to friends –if they so ask- or to a group of students or people we just met for a couple of hours?

What is the point of this storage of objects?

Why do we mean to repeat this in the future?

Why are objects left to lose their value inside boxes in storage?

Will there be a moment in time when someone will bring them back to light and examine them?

This book is made to offer a justification, a possible answer.

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SIKKIM (INDIA), Kallimpong • FOG We are treasuring the body position while supervising the variety of environmental details, following the short debates regarding the typology and the examples of the landscape. Its identity features, its meaning archives withhold within it, its form stabilisers... The how it penetrates and seal all minor thinking possibilities or extend and order the observer’s attitude and thinking patterns. The how it is scattered and transform following minor shifts, disendings, stops. The temporary unease regarding a certain or a variety of visual emergencies. The how all details and delicate observations educate the demanding, eclectic, pasionate consciousness. What is the name of this vastness of experiences.

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RILLA monastery BULGARIA

ISTANBUL, Eminonu TURKEY VENICE, Grand Canal ITALY 15

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Š Foteini Adrimi, Basel, Switzerland