On oblivious, unintentional walks through the Thuringian landscape, the feeling of a memory grows. Labyrinthine circling of the plots of land of my childhood brings to life the atmosphere of an all-pervading presence that accompanies me to this day as a mystical experience. These photographs document the attempt to visualise such a time-relativising encounter.
The section of the world captured by the camera, which transports the mood experienced in the landscape and the reflections of the light of a tiny moment, is still able to remind me that part of our being is at home outside of time. The documented section of the landscape looks at me and meets my gaze. The encounter that revives the feeling of time-forgotten stillness experienced in the landscape awakens the desire to decipher the magic of this presence, to understand it and make it available. The melancholy that dwells in the photographs, however, also confirms the experience of destroying that fleeting reality with such an attempt.
What remains is the realisation and the feeling of an unknown origin of visible things, the inkling of Sophocles of a Le monde enchanté, a world singing to itself, animating itself. The encounter of the visualised section of reality that looks at me and meets my gaze, the fleeting mood of that silent presence and this moment experienced as timeless, remains a mystery and rekindles the desire to participate in the ineffable.
- Bernd Weingart