Description
Echoes Shades | Piotr Zbierski
Echoes Shades is a story about people living close to nature, about communities and tribes cultivating ancient rituals to honor their ancestors (the photos were taken in Indonesia, Africa, India and Romania). These are also photographs analyzing the phenomenon of natural medicine in Poland and Siberia. People living close to nature, cultivating ancient rituals, nature that marks our culture and culture that stems from nature - these are issues that have always been my subjects.
Cycle Echoes Shades is a consideration of the nature of man, a search for his place in nature and an attempt to artistically revise cultural products and their origins. While working on this series, I also became interested in a parallel subject, namely traditional medicine. Echoes Shades is a photographic analysis of the relationship and coexistence of nature and culture. In my works, I understand culture as an echo of nature, while its symbols, signs, creations, or rituals as shadows of the elements and phenomena that occur in nature. The relationship of the force that "marks" (Nature) and the space that is "marked" (Culture) are for me the substrate and the main point for the analysis of modernity.
Zbierski focuses mainly on ancient cultures (often animistic, e.g. Paradangan in Indonesia, and rituals passed down for generations in oral tradition (including the institution of the Shaman in Siberian tradition, the role of rites of passage in the Tana Toraja tradition in Indonesia, initiation rituals of belonging to a community in the tradition of African tribes of the Omo Region, the role of the Whisperers of Podlasie in the region's natural medicine tradition). The series was also created in Romania, in the Maramureş region.
It is a story about man's place in nature about his passions, desires, ways of communication and letting go of emotions.