No Place with Time Stopped

Every one of us had times of crisis or change at least once in our life. In moments like these, you strive to find support in something, and sometimes, you just realise that you want to hide where the unpredictability of the passing time can’t get to you. In different cultures and traditions, there is a recurrent image symbolizing such a place—it’s a cave. A cave is a symbol of a female womb (to penetrate it and become a man), an underworld of spirits (to go down there and find yourself on the other side of death), and the centre of Mother Earth (to get to it and uncover the Great Mystery). In Antiquity, a cave became an image of a philosophical prison from which unenlightened souls could not escape, and in Christianity, it turned into an important symbol of divine revelation. Whatever role this image played in different cultures, time after time, it became an important part of cultural myth. A cave is a special place. Strictly speaking, one can’t feel cosy or comfortable in there. It is often below ground level; it’s damp, cool, and dark. Its labyrinths are unpredictable, its passages are narrow, and at any moment, there can be a dead end or a hole waiting for the explorer. Artist Andrey Berger conducts his own experiment, descending into a giant cave inside which eternal peace reigns and where time seems to have stopped. Underground landscape, unchanged for centuries; intricate rock formations, layering on each other with inhumanly slow speed; monotonously dripping water; maximum humidity and always the same temperature. What does he seek to find and understand? Perhaps he strives to immerse himself in the bosom of nature, where you might have been before you were born or where you will go after death, or just to test his strength and discover what it is like to get somewhere where time goes differently. After the journey to the other side, some artefacts are left: fragments of cave surfaces, transferred onto wooden panels, frozen stalagmites, a rope, and some clay. Clothes and shoes covered in clay are hard to clean: this is the trace that the cave explorer will retain when they returns to the surface. Both an enticing and frightening place, a cave can kill its visitor or introduce them to the sense of serenity they appear to have been seeking for so long. However, such places that negate human vanity, are best able to show us the value of life and changes it brings. Between the tranquility of the cave and the unpredictability of the world of the living, the choice here is in favor of the latter—and it is not paradoxical. Once underground, you realize more clearly than ever that there is no place for a human where time has stopped—we are time itself, the value of which is easy to feel when faced with the timelessness.