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A Story of Snow (signed)

by Bettina Gál

Photographs: Bettina Gál

Text: Bettina Gál, Bálint Veres

Publisher: selfpublished

40 pages

Pictures: 25

Year: 2013

Price: 37 €

Comments: limited to 20 copies, signed and numbered book, 140x100 mm

This book is a journey. A northern one.

In Hungarian - Bettina Gal’s native language - there are several expressions for travelling. One of them says: “who travels will see the World.” Not a different World, but the one he or she has always lived in.

So is the World invisible? Well, in a certain sense it is not visible indeed, more specifically it can never be seen sufficiently. Therefore we take the road, to make the World visible.

The journey leads to faraway, unfamiliar lands. Another sort of air, horizon, people. Ultimate relations are going to transvalue like cold/warm, small/large, near/ far, bright/dark. Of course the different language makes the World visible in another way (in Finnish there is seventy expressions for the various states of snow, while in Hungarian knows only few).

During the trip the unfolding world’s strangeness and obscurity shows that the world is a vehicle which pushes drag to the traveller. Trampling in knee-deep snow brings us to the same feeling when one is learning to walk for the first time.
World as an unfamiliar vehicle slows us down. And in this slowness our experiences turn intensive. Day by day our quick and confident routine won't work in the new vehicle. Only slowly, notch by notch can we find connection between the world and us – learning the foreign language has just been the most radical form of this experience.

The journey beginns with the desire to see the world – but at the end leads us back to percept ourselves, our own existence In the poetic visualization of this, i see the wisdom and beauty of Bettina Gal's work.