On The Border
After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes.
In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their under-side turns to the sun.
Happy to slip beyond the control of stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerable which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence. ...
From Willows by Algernon Blackwood
Michal Vasiľ (Košice, 1994-) is a photographer and cameraman born in Košice. He studied cinematography at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava.
With the photographic collection “On the border”, Michal Vasil examines the relationship between man and the nature around him. These photographs map the territory called Rye island (south-west slovakia), the largest river island and at the same time the largest groundwater drinking water reservoir in Central Europe. The project is based on a visual research of human interventions in this environment, but these are never associated with the actions of specific people – these steps are the heritage which mankind left in this area. Therefore, it may not be good to read this document literally, as a photograph of fact, but rather as a set of symbols representing ongoing phenomena. One of the main motives of this set is the conditioned water, as it makes this area so special for, unfortunately this is not captured in the photos. Instead, the author points out the activities that affect it. The addition of the set with orthophoto maps from different time periods moves it further beyond the view from the level of the human scale, the human understanding of time, the view experienced by walking in the country. - Juraj Figura
