Piotr Zbierski - Echoes Shades

Echoes Shades series is a story about people living close to nature, about communities and tribes cultivating ancient rituals honouring their ancestors, about alternative, natural medicine in Poland and Siberia.

People living close to nature, cultivating ancient rituals, nature that marks our culture and culture that results from nature - these are issues that have always been fascinating me. The Echoes Shades series is a reflection on nature of human, as well as a proces of searching for its place in nature, and an attempt of an artistic revision of cultural products and their origin. While working on this cycle, I also became interested in the parallel topic that is traditional medicine. 

Echoes Shades is the photographic analysis of the relationship and coexistence of nature and culture. In my work I understand culture as an echo of nature, while its symbols, signs, products and rituals as shades of elements and phenomena that occur in nature. The relations of strenght that "marks" (Nature) and "marked" space (Culture) are for me the foundation and the main starting point for analyzing the present

I focused mainly on ancient cultures (often animistic, e.g. Paradangan in Indonesia) and rituals transferred to generations in the oral tradition (including the institution of the Shaman in the Siberian tradition, the role of transition rituals in the tradition of Tana Toraja in Indonesia, initiation rituals of belonging to the communities of the African tribes of the Omo Region, the role of Whisperers from Podlasie in the tradition of natural medicine of the region). The cycle was also accomplished in Romania, in the Maramures region. There, I was interested in traditions associated with the annual rebirth of nature.

It is an essay about human who is derived from nature, about his passions, desires, ways of communicating and dealing with strong emotions.

Design: Bartłomiej Talaga/Piotr Zbierski