tajina
Self-published book Edition of 16 copies 88 pages 2023
Tajina explores the interplay between time, memory, spirituality, and, above all, mystery.
In 1921, a woman from South Bohemia began writing a diary about motherhood. In 2021, upon finding this diary, I continued writing in it, 100 years later. The unknown writer must have had her children around the same time as my great-grandmother, who also came from South Bohemia and whom I only know from photos and stories. Yet, I have always felt a great deal of affection for her. The diary has become a meeting place for three women who could never have met in person.
How, and to what extent, do the lives of our ancestors influence our future? Time in people's lives passes quickly; it is tied to our memory. Things around us change form, and time overlaps.
Rocks and stones around us are ancient and seemingly unchanging. Rocks have become a metaphor for strength, certainty, and faith. However, they are shaped by wind, water, ice. Every day we hear news about the weather – the near future. Weather and the elements – fickle and immediate – change the landscape persistently over the long term, though it is an almost invisible process; landscape time passes slowly compared to human time.
We are constantly standing on the edge, and that is the moment when something opens up in front of us: the invisible becomes visible, only to disappear again. The mystery – in its purest form, without the layers of meaning added by time – is a threshold.
