Ana Pečar: Serene Chorus

What we see when we look at the water in the river is only a passing moment in time. A part of the water that used to run there in the past can today be found in sediments, the sand, and gravel, but also in the material attached to the rocks and stones. All this is imbued with thousands of years old knowledge that can be understood only by the people chosen by Nikrmana. It has been passed on to us throughout the river’s history, and still is.

(Tone Kopoviščar, From the Invisible Side of the Sky)

The work of Ana Pečar traces the hidden layers of an ancient knowledge. The present corpus of video works and photos pulls its inspirations from textual and visual materials collected by Pavel Medvešček, more precisely from testimonials of the Old Faith among the Slovenes living in the Posočje region. The selected recording locations trace the sites presented in the narratives.

The ambience of The Spring of St. Mary Monastery in Kostanjevica resonates the watery essence of the Krka river surroundings. Drawing from the old layers of culture, which are mostly related to sexuality and fecundity, the spring, understood as Mary’s attribute, acts as the pivot for the available, refreshing, living water, indispensable for life and prosperity. The author has created an atmosphere that rouses the inherent forces of the landscape, challenging us with pulsations of a suggestive, golden glow of water.

Artistic focus is on water in its dimension as the medium of light. It seems to be a magical mirror: despite allowing the gaze to penetrate it quite smoothly, it nevertheless spherically mirrors up and down and all the in-between layers on the light-shadow spectrum, materializations of a co-movement visible to the eye.