远方

It was by the end of 1997, I re-visited my village after many years. Together with my first step into my village, a strange shudder emerged all over my body. There was nobody except for some old people reflecting the loneliness of centuries on their faces. There was no voice of life. Even no voice of a child that you may hear wherever you go in the east. I found myself in a deserted space, a space that I memorized every stone, every tree, every stream and every wall in it. I walked on its streets. By every step I take, the past was re-emerging lively in my consciousness, with all its strength. Then, what I realized from the wet and mourning eyes, looking at me through the shady gates, is that they’ve lost two generations. There are no young and children in their world anymore. Even if they left because they had to, it was abandonment for the remaining ones. Those generations are grinding time in the mills of the west now. Every inch of earth, imbued with memories, every trace of the former lively atmosphere was making me question myself. There is an inner drive for documentation in the nature of human being, I think. Probably it was this inner drive making me film indiscriminately. But, after some time, an opposing tendency started to occur against me filming; why was I filming, for whom? What was going to come out of these recordings? The life was passing, and I was only filming it. Then, I stopped filming. I think I was in a fight concerning the role of documentation and art in the flowing life. After a while, I re-run the camera… and I wanted to turn it towards both the remaining ones, and towards the scattered ones.