30 August – 30 October 2013 / Tobacco Warehouse “P” (Xanthi) Place: Tobacco Warehouse “P” (9, Kapnergaton str., Xanthi, tel. 2541029282) Opening hours: Mon-Fr 10.00-13.00 and 18.00-21.00 Co-organization: Foundation of Thracian Art and Tradition, Region of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, TMP The exhibition was first presnted in Thessaloniki in 2010 as part of the PhotoBiennale, at the Museum of Byzantine Culture. “The past is a most lucid source of inspiration for the present” notes Tomasz Mościcki in his attempt to showcase the aesthetic aspect of a holy site while simultaneously showing respect for its deep histo¬ry and holiness. Mościcki does not approach the Holy Mountain solely from an aesthetic perspective but with deep religiosity. Mościcki’s intention is neither to capture a particular moment in time nor to penetrate the everyday life of the Holy Mountain; his intention is to capture the existing tangible reality and to reconstruct it in a visual form. Mościcki chooses the Gum bichromate technique to give his pictures a pictorialistic dimension (Photography that imitates Painting), aiming to show that values and truths born many centuries ago remain unchangeable to this day. In Mościcki’s preferred subject matter the open spaces with faraway horizons, transcendental vistas, skies and seas, all directed towards the Monasteries, the Cloisters and the buildings with an organic role in monastic life take precedence. Much like a climber on his way up a mountain Mościcki chooses to stand on a ledge with the ground seemingly rushing away from him. On the other hand whenever he seems to approach the Monaster¬ies, he captures the surrounding space, moving into the inner court¬yards paved with slab eventually ending up at the katholikon and the sacred heirlooms. Portraits shot from a short distance are rare in Mościcki’s work with a few exceptions. In essence his monks seem like heavy dark shad¬ows permanently isolated in themselves, absorbed in their work. In Mościcki’s work, as a whole, his peculiarity does not stand nor in his craftsmanship to imprint elegant, lyric sceneries, neither in his explicit tendency of distancing himself from the rest of the world and the everyday life, as much as in the way, the photographer him¬self, comprehends this holy ground. Holy Mountain is, for Mościcki, the final destination of a journey both external and internal, a shel¬ter and a place for introspection and not a starting point. That is, at least, what his pictures of pathways and dirt roads, always leading to the Monasteries, show, as well as the photos of the signs, whose repetition indicates and formats the direction towards them. Nina Kassianou