NATURE CONTINUES TO FASCINATE us: we observe in awe from a distance its potential for violence and physicality. Impressed and over-powered by fear and respect for this great and unknown, we try to imitate and re-create these forces, or domesticate them to a scale we can control. In beholding spectacles of nature, we have an intuitive reaction to that which can conquer us, and it will forever have this potential.
Storm insists on change as an element of movement, its force and eternal mission derives destruction from flow. When it crosses us, its urge of movement requires an abandonment of our old thoughts and actions. We move where the wind blows us. In this fight for our own existence, we adopt the characteristics and patterns of movement of such forces of nature. Subjects move with the order of nature, and it will forever hold this power over us.
‘It is the principle of “correspondences” to receive the immensity of the world, which they transform into intensity of our intimate being’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994.
‘Art imitates nature, and it is the part of the same discipline to know the form and the matter up to a point.’
R P Hardie and R K Gaye from Physica in The Works of Aristotle, 1930.
‘Oh, and there’s Night, there’s Night, when wind full of cosmic space
Fling that emptiness out of your arms
into the space we breathe – maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in a more fervent flight’
Rainer Maria Rilke, the first elegy in Duino Elegies, 1930.
Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.