anita līcis-ribak’s blog

A hat, a salad, and a scandal

I've always looked up to my older women friends for clues as to what to expect later in life.  And here I have it:  I am discovering that women seem to have this uncanny ability to have more fun, as they get older.  I am all for it, especially considering how late the word "fun" entered my vocabulary, since there's no analogue in either the Latvian or the Russian languages.  There are of course words for joy, and for happiness, but nothing quite with such surprising - and healthy - dose of lightness and frivolity that the English "fun" would imply.  

The French say that a woman can make three things out of nothing: a hat, a salad, and a scandal.  Let me add something to this list of miracle products: a party!  A woman can make a party any-where, any-time, from any-thing.  And she only gets better at it.    

Here are a few pictures* I took recently at a friend's house where old friends gather once in a while for a night of girls-only party, to kick back, let their hair down (or wear someone else's), and to teach all those who are new to the concept of "fun" just what it means, to have it.  And they've surely got it!  

*I entered this series of pictures in the inaugural CURRENTS exhibit on Women, Age and Sex, called "At Her Age", curated by Martha Wilson.  The exhibit will take place in A.I.R.'s Gallery I space from December 1, 2010 through January 2, 2011.  I should know sometime in the summer whether my submission has made the cut.   

Out of Her Shoes © 2010 

Foot in the Kitchen © 2010 

The Unbareable Lightness of Being © 2010 

Downward Glance © 2010 

 

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Memento Vita, or 30 Days in Spring

For years, Agus, my husband, has insisted that April is the cruelest month. And for years, I disagreed. Until this year came around...

We were in the emergency room, Agus urinating blood and having the worst pain of his life, in his back. A CT scan was performed to confirm kidney stones in action. It also revealed a far more menacing reality: a large mass in his right kidney.

The verdict came brutal and head-on: renal cell carcinoma, or kidney cancer. That day also happened to be the beginning of our infertility treatment cycle, the first day towards a huge hope of having another child. I had just taken my first pill...

I HEAR THE BREAKS SCREECHING.

FULL STOP.

SILENCE.

Agus and I search for each other's eyes... What do you say in those moments? Will he live? How long do we have?........

Minutes, hours, days, weeks of agony, hope, pain, contemplation, procedures, procedures, procedures follow... Some 30 plus days have passed now. The longest days of our lives. Agus has had a successful surgery, and he is on his way to recovery. His tumor, albeit large, mercifully hadn't spread anywhere else, and Agus is now cancer-free! Free to go. Free to live.

I've always remembered to Memento Mori. But these days, all I want to do is, to Memento Vita. Remember Life. Think: LIFE.

So, my dear Agus, yes, April IS the cruelest month. But please allow me to -still- disagree: it has kept you with us.So thank you, April, thank you our dear family, thank you all the compassionate nurses and extraordinary doctors, thank you our many many wonderful friends, and thank you LIFE!

***
What follows is a short photo-essay, 30 Days in Spring, which I submitted for the first annual photography portfolio competition organized by the Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

***
In the depths of our hearts we are together,

in the cane field of the heart we cross through

a summer of tigers,

watching over a meter of cold flesh,

watching over a bouquet of inaccessible skin,

with our mouths sniffing sweat and green veins

 we find ourselves in the moist shadow that drops kisses

(From Furies and sorrows by Pablo Neruda)

On April 14th 2010 my husband Agustin was diagnosed with kidney cancer.

This series of photographs follows him for 30 days following that day, from the quiet and profound moments of contemplation, through the various diagnostic procedures, his admission to the hospital and the surgery to remove the affected kidney, and to the beginning of his path to recovery.

I have kept my camera at hand, night and day, as if it could protect me, and him, from the inevitable. Taking photographs of my ill husband became my way of recording - and taming - my own agonies and doubts, and recognizing the signs of hope, and the presence of joy.

There were complications after the surgery, and Agustin needed blood transfusions. One day, while waiting for the donors’ blood too arrive, I wandered outdoors, and into a nearby park. It was bursting in its spring attire, life flowing through the veins of the tree branches, feeding colors and shapes into spectacular bloom. There were shapes that were most fragile in their gestures, and there were textures and volumes that spoke of longevity and of indomitable strength.

I was thinking of my husband, as I was walking through this awe-inspiring life factory, and of the frailty of his struggling body, the resilience of his tired mind, and the fervor of his spirit.

Back in my husband’s hospital room, the time seems to stop. There are no seasons. No colors. No sounds. We are - he and I - hermetically sealed into a time capsule, where the only way of being is waiting. And hoping.

He had chosen to struggle quietly, without the arsenals of bravura and drama. He has inspired me through all these days, and keeps on doing so, with his beauty, doing things his own way, full of life, both like a gentle blossom, and a rigid trunk of a worldly mature tree.

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Making men (and women) of our dreams

Remarkable work from a young Russian photographer Alexander Gronsky!  I love his series of photographs of cities and people at dusk from the borderlines of civilization, such as Endless Night and Chukotka Travel, both under Editorial, and his ephemeral Edges series, found under Artwork.  But the collection that struck me most was Town of Brides (Editorial).  

Alexander Gronsky.  Town of Brides series.  2010

Zed Nelson.  Ox and Angela, plastic surgeon and wife. 2010

Sandro Botticelli.  The Birth of Venus.  1486

Image source: commons/wikimedia.org

Jean Léon Gerôme.  Pygmalion and Galatea.  1865-70. 

Image source: www.victorianweb.org

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About hands - 1

Yesterday I resumed my flamenco dance practice.  It's been a few years without, that started with a broken toe, and extended into a prolonged time off.  I started studying flamenco in '98, with Inés Arrubla, the first dancer to offer flamenco classes in the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts.  I jumped at the opportunity as soon as she opened the door of her studio.  I guess my passion for flamenco comes first from the guitar sounds.  And since I figured I can never learn to play a decent flamenco on the guitar, I can at least try to express it with my body.  It has been a wonderful journey.  It took some years, not months, without exaggeration, just to get to a point where my body started accepting the flamenco form: head raised high up above the shoulders; shoulders down, chest up and forward, like a bull's horns, elbows having a life of their own, almost always away from the body, feet that work as a percussion, and so on... The hands, in all their myriad of expressions, are by far the most difficult to master.  I am still working on it...   

So, I want to talk about hands... 

 

Hands say so much.  And hands never lie.  You can change your face, stretch it fold-less, you can tuck in your belly, your can wear a wig, or a glass eye, you can reduce the size of your toes (no kidding!), but you can't do much with your hands.  See Zed Nelson's Love Me Nr.16 for a proof.  And how ironic that the subtitle says "Age undisclosed" while in fact, Sally's hands tell her age, loud and clear.  I watch my own hands change with age.  And I know they are telling the truth. 

 

In flamenco, the hand becomes like a flower.  It opens and closes, it breathes along with the dance.  You can do an entire dance with your hand alone, without ever getting up from a chair.  One of the most beautiful things about flamenco is that you don't have to be 16, or even 35 to look great when you dance.  In fact, I believe, the flamenco dancer becomes ever more noble, and more expressive with age.  It's the scarsity of movement, its carefully chosen expressions that become loaded with emotion and meaning.  Because you, the onlooker, are hungry for it.  And because you know that the dancer has a lot to say.  She has lived a life.  

 

Like my mother.  No, she doesn't dance flamenco.  For her, dancing flamenco would be an unimaginable luxury.  She has lived all her life, humbly and simply, finding fulfillment in serving others.  She has suffered like no other in her life.  But always, always found joy in the little things around her.  And she has been contagious with that skill.  

 

So, here are my mother's hands.  The hands that cradled me when I was small.  The hands that would cradle me still.  If I asked...     

The hands that cradled me.  2009.  Rīga, Latvia

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Every day, between yesterday and tomorrow - 4

What do you think of, when you think of BLACK? 

In the Tower: Mark Rothko at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. The show runs until January 2011. 

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Every day, between yesterday and tomorrow - 2

I took this photograph peering through one of the tunnel-like openings formed by the massive stone walls in the base of "The Liberty statue of India", a 133 feet (40.5 m) tall stone sculpture of the Tamil saint and poet Tiruvalluvar, author of the Thirukkural. (Thirukkural, a classic of couplets, or aphorisms, is considered to be the first work to focus on ethics in Dravidian Literature). The sculpture was completed in 2000 and is located atop a small island near the town of Kanyakumari, which lies on the southernmost tip of the The Indian Peninsula, where three bodies of water, the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea meet.

On my trip through Tamil Nadu in Southeast India in February I met and talked to several people whose lives are intrinsically tied to the ocean, and who told me their personal accounts of the terrible morning in December of 2004, the day of the most infamous tsunami. One was a young fisherman who by night sells beautiful sea shells on Chennai beach. He and his friend were preparing to go out to the sea in their small wooden boat that morning. They were spared, but the mother of his friend was killed by the wave. Another one, an old man, was doing his usual chores at the Gandhi Memorial in Kanyakumari, preparing the museum for the opening, when the tsunami hit. Everything inside the museum was destroyed, he told me, all the photographs were washed away, windows shattered, but he, save for the vision in one of his eyes, was spared. The wave was so enormous, he told me, that it touched the shoulder of Tiruvalluvar's statue. I looked back at the statue from where he and I were standing. It was dwarfing the tiny figures of people gathered at its feet. And I would have thought that this man is a reincarnation of baron Munchausen. Except that I was full well aware of the extensive damage that this tsunami had produced in the region, and seen areas still desolate of life, 6 years after. So I stood there, stretching my imagination around this new information like some Glad Cling Plastic Wrap over an elephant, and feeling increasingly queazy.

I look at this photograph, and the calmness and peace of the three oceans are astonishing if not reassuring, in the perspective of things. As if it was tamed and composed by the dark square of the dense stone frame, and smoothed out from above by the silver light. A finishing touch - a tiny boat in the distance - was added by a pedantic producer last minute. And voila, we've got ourselves a very agreeable picture. As if there never was a wave that touched the poet's shoulder...

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Every day, between yesterday and tomorrow - 1

Today marks for me an involuntary first anniversary: on this day last year a doctor told me I had Grave's disease, an autoimmune condition that tricks your body into telling your thyroid it has to work harder.  Much harder.  I had never heard of Grave's before.  Needless to say, the name itself wasn't very conducive to inspire optimism.  What's in a name, anyway?  In this case, not exactly a projection of the outcome, specifically speaking, but the name of a hard-working innocent Irish guy who discovered the disease in his patients almost 200 years ago.  I was told that although not curable, its symptoms can be kept in check by way of surgery, radiation or medication.  I chose the latter, not so much because I chickened out fearing the invasiveness of the first two methods, but rather because as always I was optimistic and thought that something cosmic would click in me, and I would get fixed up the easy way.  (I'd had to fight for my life before, although never the easy way, and found that the human body is much stronger and more able to self-heal - given the right conditions and attitude - than I thought it to be.)  One year later, things are looking up, but I am still waiting for that cosmic click to materialize.  The truth is, the cosmos will only cooperate self-indulgently, in a sporadic non-pattern.  So when I wake up in the morning I still never quite know which stripe I'm going to get assigned today! 

All this rambling brings me to what I really wanted to say.  I'm humbled by the way this turn of events has made me downgrade myself, reluctantly, from a seemingly omnipotent humanoid to a mere mortal, ;-) and turn my gaze more towards what really matters: the people I love, the small things in life that make me tick, the big things that bombard my mind out of its comfort zone and that inspire me, and currently - trying to tune in with the FLOW, as the brilliant Michaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the state of optimal human experience. 

  
Today I am starting a new set of daily photographs.  These will be quiet and sometimes abstract meditations on slower moments in life.

   

Weighing on Georgia.  Vanishing Point series.  2009

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Conversations in achromatic tones - 5

Today I am going to cheat.  And why not?  It's been a wonderfully sunny day, and I feel that everything's permitted! ;-) 

So, my today's post is not that achromatic after all.. Not only it has color in it, but I decided to call the photograph what it seems: The Blues.  

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Conversations in achromatic tones - 4

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Conversations in achromatic tones - 2

December 30th 2006.  I was (still) on my honeymoon.  

Venice and Venetians, from the 'People' series.  2006

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