BE MY GUEST is a venue for others to share their art; I assemble between creators in my sitting room. Linear time and locality are not relevant.

Ioram Melcer is a writer and a translator, mainly from Spanish and Pourtuguese. I learned about  Fernando Pessoa through his brilliant translation and introduction to The Book of Disquiet; It connected poetry to my early childhood memories I had from Lisbon.

We also share the love to Cesaria Evora, the great singer who steped on stage bare foot, connected to the earth.

I link him and the multifaceted artist Dorit Feldman.

Physical  layers of images, texts, ancient maps –  alchemically turn out to into artworks holding story, time and a spiritual place. Her work is a wide-open door to connotations between reality, myth, history and fiction. Following her I am taken deep into Mediterranean memory and symbols.

Both creators’ maps and footprints will be on my mind as I walk on Ithaca beach looking for Odysseus’ marks, trying to figure out some of my routs.

“To walk barefoot everywhere is to draw your own map. To me, this is my homeland. In our life here, in a border-less land, a country whose waist used to be thin and then became thick without digesting what it took in. Such a country makes it hard for you to find a homeland within it. My old homeland, the country of my childhood, the homeland about which the poet said “A man is the likeness of his homeland’s landscape”, has been swallowed by the noise, by the occupation, by the blurring of its lines and the fluidity of its limits. Just like I use only those words which I know, my homeland is only where I step and accumulate and feel, that by which I let myself be marked as a map. Wherever I walk barefooted.

This is my private homeland, I attest to it with both my feet and do so willingly. Part of it isn’t in this country, but in other places, and in the memories of a childhood not all of which was in this “here” which is slipping away from us and fast becoming real-estate, a victim of a rude takeover. After all this years, I make my homeland accessible and portable, close and assured, touching and fulfilling. Any place where I go barefoot is stamped on me and is added to my map, to the pattern on my memory, to the homeland which only I feel, the one which goes with me always and which I recognize without words, free of the times and their terrors. My homeland is the likeness of my barefoot journey. And I am there every day, unknown to others.”

Ioram Melcer

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5OQ37VA1yI

LIST OF WORKS BY DORIT FELDMAN:

Duality, 2011,photograph printed on archival fine art paper 114X103  [I recomend to enlarge the painting]

Tear Fossils, 2011, photograph printed on archival fine art paper 114X103

Black Basalt Lake, 2011, photograph printed on archival fine art paper 54X46 cm