To the North Wind

Video art, slideshow

Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, 2002. Late afternoon: the tramontana enters through an open window and sets the curtains in motion. In that small choreography, I feel a pull toward my homeland—toward Zeeland. The gesture summons the imagery of a Japanese poem:

A ship from Holland!
With numerous sails,
Ahead of the embowed clouds.

Assembled in 2025 from photographs taken then, the video returns to the same movement, but the longing has turned. The wind is unchanged; the vantage point has shifted. What once reached northward now reaches back to Tavarnelle—an inverted heimwee, carried across time.

Part of an ongoing series of slideshows, the work makes wind visible only indirectly: through what it stirs and sets into motion—a curtain, a tree, a plant.