Rethinking

As the weeks pass and winter gives way to spring, my mind remains close to my current photobook project, In Search of Nijinsky. Over the past few weeks, I have been experimenting more with the work I have created and rediscovered in recent months.

The images that emerge offer a glimpse into Nijinsky’s mind as I imagine it. The confusion and the shift in his mental state become increasingly clear as I delve deeper into his world.

But that also makes me rethink the project. When I look at the printed images and try to make some edits, I’m not so sure about it anymore. I’ve even considered removing all the dancers, though I know I’ll likely feel differently tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Switzerland is calling. The clinic where he spent his first period of hospitalization still partly stands in Kreuzlingen, and I have the feeling that there are still images waiting to be made there. My plan is to travel to Switzerland at the end of April and take a small train journey in his footsteps—walking where he walked, tracing his final days of freedom.

The mountain landscape in all its power and vastness—as a final breath, a counterbalance to the darkness, and the descent into solitude. Following the manic period of his densely written diaries and his virtuosic drawings.

“One day, I was in the mountains and got onto a road that led up to a mountain. I went along it and stopped. I wanted to speak on the mountain because I felt the desire to do so. I did not speak because I thought everyone would say that that man was mad. I was not mad, because I felt. I felt not pain, but love for people. I wanted to jump from the mountain into the little town of St. Moritz. I did not shout, because I felt that I had to go farther. I went farther and saw a tree. The tree said to me that no one could not speak here, because men did not understand feeling(…)”

—Vaslav Nijinsky, The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (written 1919)