CAMPFIRE/LAUZAVIETE:

During three summers walking along rivers and lakes in Lithuania, the remains of campfires grew increasingly prominent, as if signals indicating my intuitive navigations, confirming a route.

Even at the periphery of a highway, hospital or waste-dump, I found the ashy, trashy remains of campfires strangely spellbinding. These abandoned bonfires looked like burial mounds or prehistoric altars in a limbo state impatient with time and unconcerned with orientation.

I’ve never been convinced that leisure or play were simple subjects, though they are casually pursued and easily dismissed. The rituals of what we call leisure, be it bathing in a lake or burning a bonfire, tell us about places; about their history, their means of community, their lures and their revolts.

When I started photographing the campfires I came across along trails, urban alleyways, and lakeside, I did not yet know I stood in the last country in Europe to be converted from Paganism’s previous centuries of fire-worship, where fire symbolized purification and protection, where flames were once guarded by virgin girls, or vaidilutes. Long ago, the Lithuanian dead were buried alongside rivers, only shallow graves, built sturdier by hovering mounds of branches, stones, and dirt above. Fires by the riverside are still lit annually in Lithuania to greet the summer solstice and to keep dark spirits at a safe, if mythical, distance.

It was once believed that Lithuanian ancestors lived on at the hearth of sacred fires, and that to feed this fire was to worship the gods, to pay homage to one’s lineage. These casual, contemporary campfires, though ordinary and mundane, also seemed to point to the ongoing need for the communal, ceremonial and celebratory within the natural environment. To me, these humble, handmade fires seemed to offer hope for the continuation, even the revival, of a human connection with the elements.

A theory of campfires coerces casual play and cultural ritual to become maddeningly, gloriously intermingled. In the fire-pits there are stories both mundane and monumental: meat smoking as well as bodies burning. Bonfires exist by different names in diverse terrains, yet all point out our need for humble, human gestures of earthly communion, feast and pleasure. Campfires are points of culture before culture is named. They leave traces that tell stories before monuments are made. They continue to burn, yet they are dim and endangered, almost instant relics of the recently living.