8th Land Art Festival – Holy Day – competition

From the very beginning celebrating holy days has been featured in human life. Being special days, events or spiritual state they made life meaningful, individually or socially. A holy day is much more than one of many days in a calendar. Celebration is natural human for people. We should look closer how our ancestors celebrated rain, good harvests, termination of war, marriages, entering maturity – everything that stood in contradiction to commonplaceness and ordinary routine, everything that demanded nobility of a ceremonious form. Holy days and commonplaceness are intertwined as four seasons are. We read in Qohelet:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A holy day is a socially binding factor that brings people closer, constructs the world of shared values and reinforces solidarity. As a social institution it requires collective engagement – you can cry in solitude, but you have to celebrate with others. A holy day is time of peace, joy, forgetting about anger and dissimilarities. During this special time quarrels are simply not acceptable. Land Art Festival refers to these positive aspects and takes into consideration nature and its processes, as opposed to celebration as consumption. Holy woods, clearings, ponds, sacred spots, ancient woods in which gods used to make their appearance, can still function as natural temples where man can find shelter from the world of
accelerating speed and growing madness. We are not short of such places in the magic and multicultural Podlasie region. We also strive after symbolic return to the time when folk or ancient rituals, enactments and rites had their indisputable value and brought a spiritual dimension into people’s lives. Through the whole arsenal of words, gestures, manners, dances, songs, dresses, rare artefacts people gave themselves to the authentic joy of feasting. Gratitude instead of expansion, humility in place of invasion, curiosity mingled with holy fear instead of apparent omniscience, gift and waste instead of calculation. We approach holy days holistically, assuming oneness of man and nature, but also with a social, historical and cultural context. We aim at getting away from routine, discovering the beauty of the Bug river environs and immersing in what is local. Through celebrating in all possible ways, we can enter into communion, even for a little while, with what is inaccessible in everyday life.

We invite you to participate in the competition for the project of work dedicated to the festival. All important information can be found HERE.