…it is a question of survival
in the endless seas
of our consciousness
to raise up islands
from the wreckage of our thoughts –
in connection,
but in resistance too.
The islands within us is a metaphor for those territories of the spirit that every person seeks and creates within themselves. In contemporary psychology and art, these are the zones of “inner emigration” – the places we withdraw to when the world becomes too loud or too demanding.
This is territory not intended for “mass bathing”– here, the writing on the shore is more an attempt at rescue. In these hidden corners, the tides are a purgatory: they carry away everything written on the sand, and it ceases to be merely an action, becoming instead an ontological condition, or a presence of the self in its purest, most stripped-back form. The erasure of the letters by the waves is not loss but a form of metaphysical acceptance – there and then, you return your thought to the infinity from which it came, and through this you accept your solitude.
As Maurice Blanchot writes in one of his essays, “essential solitude” is not the condition of a person who is alone, but the condition of the creative act itself. This is the moment in which the author ceases to be “I” and becomes “nobody”, so that the work may be born. Just as close is the poet John Keats’s philosophical concept of negative capability – the artist’s capacity to dwell in uncertainty and doubt by surrendering to them. Or, put differently: to let yourself sink, in order to discover that islands accumulate precisely in resistance to that sinking. To let yourself sink, however, presupposes a body free to disappear. Maggie Nelson1 writes:
You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together, and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is – working with it rather than struggling against it.
The island, in fact, is sovereign territory for the vulnerable body; a refuge from the labels and the weight of society. The archive of consciousness accumulates and is kept, in order to become self-expression, and to be named art. Once it has appeared, the work ceases to be a window onto the maker’s thoughts and becomes, instead, a mirror for whoever contemplates it. Meaning is no longer enclosed within the object but is born in the empty space between it and the viewer. In an environment oversaturated with ready-made answers, contemplation becomes a personal choice to remain alone with oneself, in the midst of the horizon. This is the starting point of the search – a conscious act of resistance against excess noise from without, and above all against the noise within ourselves.
- Maggie Nelson directly quotes Pema Chödrön in this passage from The Argonauts on revolutionary language. And she appends: ‘And the thing is, even you don’t always know.’ ↩︎
125 YEARS OF ART GALLERY KAZANLAK
Memory and the present
For 125 years, Art Gallery Kazanlak has captured and preserved the invisible threads of time. Its rich collection, begun in 1901 by Ivan Enchev – Vidyu, comprises more than 5,000 works. Behind them lie not merely canvases and inventory numbers, but living human destinies. This is a chronicle of the shared ground between past and present; an ever-open dialogue.
The great story of art is always written in the quiet of everyday life before being recorded as history. Heritage is a living tissue, regenerated through the nervous system of the present day. And it is for this reason that the gallery team long ago stepped beyond the role of dispassionate custodians to become contemporary translators of memory.
Today, taking its place on prestigious national stages such as the Apollonia Festival of Arts, the gallery proves that a museum is not a static location but a continuous movement. Through innovative initiatives, large-scale curatorial projects and the digitisation of its archives, Art Gallery Kazanlak does not merely display art – it creates a living environment in which past and present speak the same language.
Throughout the exhibition, the following passages from Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence appear on the walls:
‘I tell you I’ve got to paint. I can’t help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn’t matter how he swims, well or badly: he’s got to get out or else he’ll drown.’
‘Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist.’
‘Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.’
‘Sometimes I’ve thought of an island lost in a boundless sea, where I could live in some hidden valley, among strange trees, in silence. There I think I could find what I want.’