prayerflags/ lungta (windhorse)
That which carries the most precious through the world. Rectangular flags in various sizes, furnished with wishes and prayers to the welfare of all beings, sway in the wind above hills and mounts, valleys, cities and countries. They connect houses, being stretched across broad rivers, and they dance in the cold breezes of high and desolated mountain passes on the roof of the world. With 'globalization' they also came and moved into europe and wave in the gardens of buddhist centres as well as hang from private balkonies and terasses. In the german city I live I recently saw two sides of the same road being connected by these colourful indo-tibetan flags. We find different aspects of the Buddha's teaching imprinted on them in the wondrous tibetan script, but mainly wishes for good health, protectedness and ease for our hearts and minds, specifically the universal wish (from the kalachakra tantra): Peace for the world. So the wind constantly carries these prayers uninterruptedly across borders into every corner of the world and the atmosphere. My yearly journey to Nepal brought me closer to this theme and idea and the thought that a wish may travel with the wind found a pleasant resonance in me. So I started to document the flags in all the different states of their swaying and decaying lives from brand new and colourful to pale and brittle, windswept and blowzed. I made panoramas and closeups, whole scenes and little fragments, freely swaying or torn to the ground, jamed, muddled or even ritually burned at the end of their lives. In the following chapter you can see a representative cross section, pictures from Nepal and Germany. On these works not the technically perfect picture was my concern, but much more the contemplative view on the theme and its cyclic depiction. In this way the process is not characterized by 'seraching the motive' but rather by 'finding the motive' or better still: by simply 'seeing the motive'.