Campfire/Lauzaviete: Lithuania 2005-2008
In Love And Battle With Lithuanian Campfires
I found myself utterly enchanted the first time I stood before a lake just at the outskirts of Vilnius. Surrounded by tall forest the landscape was inhabited differently than those I came from in America, where to enter into nature required a map and a ticket, a clearly cut trail and a particular destination. Though populated by a youthful group, the lake and forest around me suggested something older, quieter and oddly difficult to name. During three summers photographing lakes and bathers in Lithuania, the remains of campfires grew increasingly prominent, as if signals indicating my route.
Even at the periphery of a highway, hospital or waste-dump, I found the ashy, trashy remains of campfires strangely spellbinding. With rotting melon rinds attacked by ants, and gleaming glass bottles still fragrant with liquor, these abandoned bonfires in unlikely places looked like burial mounds or prehistoric altars in a state without time or orientation.
When I began to photograph campfires a few years ago I did not know I stood in the last country in Europe to be converted from Paganism’s previous centuries of fire-worship, where fire symbolized purification and protection, where flames were once guarded by virgin girls, or vaidilutes. Flames were still lit to greet the seasonal solstices, keeping dark spirits at a safe, if mythical, distance. It was once believed that Lithuanian ancestors lived on at the hearth of sacred fires, and that to feed this fire was to worship the gods, to pay homage to one’s lineage. These casual, contemporary campfires, though ordinary and mundane, also seemed to point to the ongoing and ancient need for the communal, ceremonial and celebratory within our natural environments. These humble, handmade fires offered hope for the continuation, even the revival, of our connection with these elements.
I’ve never been convinced that leisure or play were simple subjects, though they are casually pursued and easily dismissed. The rituals of what we now call leisure, be it bathing in a lake or burning a bonfire, cooking outdoors or star-watching from a hill, tell us about places; about their history, their means of community, their lures and their revolts. In England, the Sussex bonfires were first burned to nonviolently express political dissent, while the campfire-clubs of America cultivated leadership amidst those forging their way toward the Western frontier. In India, ritual fires have been lit for 5,000 years as an offer to the Hindu Gods, burning away the impurities of both body and spirit. In Lithuanian lauzavietes, what comes from earth, yet by burning rises in the smoke toward uncharted realms above, conjures still smoldering, still violent and vivid life, a life in love and battle with ourselves and our surroundings.
A theory of campfires muddles distinctions between the natural and constructed, between the private and political. A theory of campfires coerces casual play and cultural ritual to become maddeningly, gloriously intermingled. In the fire-pits there are stories both mundane and monumental: meat smoking as well as bodies burning. As we celebrate and as we trample, there is much to take notice of. Here, in the falling away of boundaries between what is sanctioned and what is neglected within our environments, we might decipher our history and conceive of our future.
It is well known that over a campfire, sustenance, warmth and community is forged. Bonfires exist by different names in diverse terrains, yet all point out our need for humble and human gestures of earthly communion, feast and pleasure. Campfires are points of culture before culture is named. They leave traces that tell stories before monuments are made. They continue to burn, yet they are dim and endangered, almost instant relics of the recently living. They too will disappear under the flora one day, as perhaps they should, for they are, like all celebrations, fleeting monuments to survival.
