I was happy to meet a girl I could expect not to be there (anymore).

Last November, as a Dutch artist living in Moldova, I went for a few days with my friend Victor Gutu and two other painters to a little picturesque Moldovan village called Butuceni, about 30 kilometers north of the capitol Chisinau. They were going to paint in the open air, an activity I’ve never experienced. I decided to join them, to have some rest, escape the city, enjoy the last good weather of the year and maybe to make some photos on the way for the photobook I am working on entitled “Это Мой Дом – Жестокий Рай” or “This is my House – the cruel paradise”.

The village is extremely beautiful, situated on a peninsula at the bottom of a canyon carved into the earth through a million years by the river Raut. The local houses are made out of mud and wood, colourfully painted in bright blue or green with hand carved decorations of flowers and birds everywhere. You might not believe it but this place once used to be a centre of the world! The area is an important archaeological and geological location: nearby you can find the leftovers of a Mongolian settlement, the ruins of a Turkish bathhouse, the caves of early Christian monks. There is even a cave-church still in use and in summertime there are butterflies of all kinds everywhere.

I’m pretty sure this place, if situated for instance 30 kilometers north of my former habitat Amsterdam, would be a major tourist attraction like cheesetown Edam... but it isn’t. It is just another village of thousands in this young and poor country of the former Soviet Union. A sandy road goes through it and about every 300 meters there is a well – no running water in the houses. Mainly elderly people live in the little farms with a garden in the backyard where they grow the essential things they need. Some vegetables, corn and potatoes, a small vineyard, a few chickens around the house... and there are small children who are looking after the few cows in the fields or the geese along the riverbanks. In the village there’s a shop and a bar for sugar, salt, matches and vodka, the things that do not grow in a garden. On the surface it all looks like a happy and self-supporting system, an economy without need of money, but somehow something in these surroundings is missing. Then you realize that you hardly see any adults between 20 and 50. They are working somewhere else: some in Chisinau, but most further away as seasonal workers, cheap or illegal, in Russia or in the west to keep their families alive in this cruel paradise they were once born.

While the painters put their easel on a romantic spot on the edge of the village near the ravines and the river I decide to take a walk to the highest point overlooking the area. The weather is perfect in early November and the sky is blue. And while I climb, following a goat’s track and imagining I am all alone on the planet, I find on top of the hill a girl, holding a pink mobile telephone, calling an outside world. I am in love with her colors. I ask her: Do not run away, please stay. She stays, at least for this photo.

Ron Sluik, 22 January 2003 Chisinau.

Coming up soon:

“This is my House – the cruel paradise” – a new photobook by the Dutch artist Ron Sluik with afterword by Irina Grabovan. A publication by AoRTA – Chisinau – rep. Moldova – www.art-aorta.narod.ru.

11–28 March 2003 – Ron Sluik Photoworks – solo-exhibition CIAC Bucharest.
14 April – 2 May 2003 – Photoworks – solo and group-exhibition ‘Arti et Amicitiae’ Amsterdam.

Other artists asked by galeria AoRTa to participate in this presentation are:
Bertien van Manen, Walter Bartelings, Joost Conijn, Ine Lamers, Arno Nollen, Joep Neefjes, Rene Duinkerken (NL), Ruben Bellinkx (Belgium), Walter Bergmoser (Germany), Ivan Faktor (Croatia), Max Bleaulich, Johannes Steidl, Lucas Horvath (Austria), Dimitri Konradt (Russia), Sasha Tinei (Moldova/Hungaria), Victor Gutu and Irina Grabovan (Moldova).

Ron Sluik (1961) lives and works as artist and photographer in Chisinau.
Irina Grabovan (1965) runs Galeria AoRTa, an independant space for contemporary arts and photography.

For more information please contact – sluik@gmx.net