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PREFACE ART - COSMOS AND LIGHT OF THE SPIRIT “So God created man in his own image” Genesis 1:27

e can define Art as Cosmos and Light of the Spirit. It is a Cosmos opened to infinity, expanding in concentric circles, and constantly enriching with new galaxies. God excepting, nothing speaks so powerfully about man like Art, which produces the most precious product of all the products that he could have created and imagined: beauty, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance... They are all divine acts of the Spirit which are transcendent by definition, and they elevate man from the earthly towards the heavenly, towards the primal authentic source of his origin and existence. And truly, Art is the most prominent sign that man did not reach his holy fire through blind evolution, but that it was ignited in every atom of his Spirit by the Creator Himself, as early as his conception at the beginning of Creation. Since then, that eternal fire, like a genetic code, has been left to us as a legacy and the most worthy property we have inherited from our Father in heavens. It is the most powerful evidence that He created us in his own image and likeness, not only physically, but also spiritually. Art, being a gift, contains many other gifts and powers within itself. Among other things, it also possesses healing powers, so welcomed by humanity thrown into suffering, thrown into the dark night of history, into a life groaning under the burden of evil, in which he builds a home on the foundations of pain. But even in such a life, man passes through the dangerous labyrinth of existence with the light of Art, which possesses the power of faith - of the same strength as the faith Jesus talks about in the New Testament. And with it, same as with faith, man can move mountains. In that sense, we can understand William Blake who says that we don’t need only faith for our salvation, but Art as well. It is needed because it radiates beauty and goodness, it radiates light in which man and mankind come to know their divine origins. As such, Art is absolutely transcendent and carries within itself the utopia of spiritual happiness, cleansed of any crude existential mud, social restraints or historic catastrophes. Art promises this utopia, which was, as a prophetic vision, was ingeniously sensed by Dostoevsky: “Art will save the world”. It will perhaps happen when all human souls, like the beasts and stones lured by Orpheus’ music, come and drink from its spring.

Dear God, may that day come sooner!

E. K. 2

The idea of Planetarism was born by accident After all, one of my aphorisms “One point everywhere, all the points in one” made me think about it. Then came “One art in all arts, all the arts in one.” In fact, even from the outset I imagined Planetarism as a multimedia project. The painting Planetarium was created during my journey around the world between 1996 and 1997. On this journey I was accompanied by a film crew from MRT (Macedonian Radio Television) and a photographer whose photographs later served as an authentic document in the monograph dedicated to the creation of the painting. Afterwards, the idea of Planetarism continued to spread. Initially this project was developed in the field of painting, film, video, photography, which later expanded to a ballet performance with the same name, followed by a book of poetry and several books with aphorisms. It can freely be said that the idea outgrew itself. But is there a boundary between the arts, whether they are called painting, sculpture, music, film, video, ballet, literature or design? Painting equals colours, music equals sound, film and video are moving images, sculpture adds the third dimension, ballet melts the boundary between body and spirit, and literature through its words can turn the author or reader into a point, time, space or nothing. There is also design which simplifies the form so as for it to be noticeable at first glance, and possibly later be experienced in a different way. Or all these arts might be an axis composed of several parts that can be understood, grow, enrich… Thus, the performance of the ballet dancer reminds us of a bird’s flight, the spasm on the face of an unknown actor can freeze time, and the cold blue light that fills the interior of a night club can cause shivers in the look of a lonely wanderer sitting in the corner of that bar, or some thought might remind us that Confucius understood so well the human vanity as if he had lived for centuries. As a consolation let’s remember that in today’s world nothing is normal, unless you are crazy, and some say that art and artists are the closest sisters to craziness. It was in this way that Planetarism was created.

Kiro Urdin

PLANETARISM MOVEMENT Artistic founder Kiro Urdin

One point everywhere, everything in one point. One art in every art, every art in one art.

Paintings film video photography music literature ballet design 4

Synopsis Scenarios Aphorisms Poetry OMO Valley text written by Kiro Urdin

PLANETARIUM (1996/97)

is the first painting in human history to be worked on all over the world

1996/97

he painting Planetarium consists of two panels, each covering 24 square metres.

The artist KIRO URDIN has dedicated twenty months to the execution of this work in different places on our planet: the Berlin Wall, Nerezi, Ohrid, Brussels, Knokke-le-Zoute, Bruges, Paris, Rome, Pompei, Pisa, the Suez Canal, London, Stonehenge, Athens, Cape SoĂşnion, the Tomb of Jesus Christ and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the Nile, the Great Pyramid in Giza, Memphis, Kenya (Masai Mara), New York, Machu Picchu, Cuzco, Bangkok, Peking (the Forbidden City) and the Great Wall of China, Tokyo, Kamakura, Nuenen and Eindhoven. It presents itself as a multimedia project, as an integration and synthesis of several arts such as paintings, film, video, photography, music, literature, philosophy, ballet, design...

Think freely about freedom of thought

Better than the first is the second who will become the first. If you are quiet, you are the greatest ocean. Aim for a place that no one else has reached.

Ohrid, Macedonia

Nerezi, Macedonia

Knokke, Belgium

MARBLE

Colloseum, Roma

Pisa

Tonight I wanted to whisper something to you before I reached the sea sand and the two women who were alone, tonight I wanted to tell you that the sea wanted me to be here next to the waves, to the sea sand, to the two women with two roses who were alone, and I to be alone without myself so that I become sand under their feet here in the blue waters of Carrara, and maybe the marble contained the secret of the emptiness in your eyes as if they knew about me before I was here, only I am neither sand nor water, but marble in the hands of Michelangelo.

ONE THING OR ANOTHER My father was born at the start of the century, my mother was born a little later, towards the middle of the century I was born, before that my brothers and my sisters were born, nineteen years ago my daughter was born, five years after her birth one of my three brothers died. From now on it will be the one thing or the other.

Pompeii

Greece Berlin

A part of Urdinâ€™s biography...

am average in all things: of average height, of average weight, of average years and the colour of my eyes is average... So from an average I became a point. That is why nobody notices me anymore. Now my destiny depends on the place where they insert me in the written text. But if anyone asks me what my opinion is, my response is this: since I am a point, I donâ€™t want to remain in any one place but to be in motion. Greece

If you are different I am just like you. You are surrounded by empty space, your light cannot reflect.

Berlin

Brussels

Paris

Mont Saint-Michel

Memphis, Egypt

Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt

Suez Canal, Egypt

Kenya

FLOWER When I tell you that I love you you won’t be here any more, you’ll be another flower in another’s garden. If I don’t tell you that I love you I’ll be another’s flower in your garden. When I tell you that we love one another you’ll start to love my flower but you’ll start to grow in another’s garden.

Machu Picchu

London

THRESHOLD

IT HURTS

I was born on the threshold of the door if you are love cross over me.

O Lord, my soul burns and it hurts! Love is being born there where it hurts.

Stonehenge, Edwin Meulensteen and K.U.

London

Stonehenge

Beijing, China

STONE

The stone decided to be everlasting, to travel like a cloud, to be a stone and live in glory. It read books, encyclopaedias, whole libraries, newspapers, almanacs and compasses pointing to the ancient magic of China. For nights on end it dreamed of the wall of immortality the dragon stone that has breathed for centuries, sought the stones of friendship, sought the stones of generation. All the stones made room for the weary traveller, the traveller who journeyed like an everlasting cloud, the traveller who found rest among his stony brothers.

Great Wall of China

Kamakura, Japan

Bangkok, Thailand

HUMANISING Man decided to humanise himself and from a man became a bird. The bird decided to humanise itself and from a bird became a plant. The plant decided to humanise itself and from a plant became a heart. The heart decided to humanise itself and from a heart became love.

Jerusalem

A SECRET Be with me a little longer tomorrow I may not be here tomorrow the sky and the grass may not be here. Be with me a little longer tomorrow I may meet the secret I cannot meet today.

Jerusalem

THE SQUARE

Paris

The place where we were to meet exists no more. Our city has died in its squares. In streets without children, trees or blades of grass concrete threatens mutely. The place where we were to meet exists no more. Our meeting became a journey of steps which have forgotten how to move. I seek you in letters, seek you in our book, seek you in the concrete, seek you in the mute streets while the city prays for its old alleyways for people bearing branches, for feet leaving tracks. Does our city need those squares, does it need sad streets of concrete and iron? Once people had faces, shadows, suns, once people had feet that left tracks. Thatâ€™s how we began, grew fond among plants and roots, without concrete in our city, in our book, in the pages of the city square in the dream that should have been.

New York

Skopje

What is better than the next time is now.

New York

Nuenen, Netherlands

Gerard H. Meulensteen

Eindhoven, Netherlands

Marin Dimeski, Kiro Urdin, Viktor Ivanov and Ivan Mitevski

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Planetarium painting

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After painting and film planetarium

planetarium ballet

Toronto

Debbie Wilson

DEBBIE WILSON AND PLANETARIUM

ometimes unpredictable things happen in life. Such an unpredictable thing is my collaboration with the great choreographer Debbie Wilson who lives and works in Toronto. By coincidence Debbie saw my film “Planetarium” and proposed to me to do a ballet performance based on the film script. Thus, our cooperation was born. The work was first performed in Toronto by the dancers from OMO Dance Theatre and MNT (Macedonian National Theatre). The artists from Canada were from various nationalities, precisely in the spirit of planetarism. This was followed by performances in Skopje, Ohrid, Heraclea, Chicago, Ankara, as well as the performance in Geneva to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. In her interview Debbie very explicitly spoke of the eternal dilemmas and material uncertainty when it comes to living off the arts, referring to the moments of the joint project.

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Choreographer Debbie Wilson is the Artistic Director and Founder of the OMO Dance Company for which she has created a repertoire of critically acclaimed works, including Homo Office Sapiensis, which received a 2002 Dora Mavor Moore nomination for “Outstanding New Choreography“, Aphrodite Unveiled and Raphael is whispering. Through her international collaborative works like Planetarium (with Macedonia) and Diary of an Exile (with Trinidad and Tobago) she has introduced outstanding foreign artists in dance, music and art to Toronto while representing Toronto and Canada on the world stage. Wilson is a dance and social activist who believes in using her art to forge ties among peoples and create catalysts that stimulate constructive dialogue about the betterment of our community. Her choreographic themes reflect our current social environment and provide insights to the beauty and truth of the human condition that audiences have found moving, relevant, accessible and most of all, powerful. Her work forge ties between peoples of all ages and cultures through projects that are created to give a better understanding of the world we live in today. Wilson has also established links with and continues to work with an expanding list of local and international community social groups that provide aid in the health and social sectors. She is currently a Board Member of the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation, serving on the fundraising, communications, strategic planning and Bike Rally Committees. Wilson began her professional career with the Cincinnati Ballet Company at the age of 12 where she was promoted to soloist and rehearsal assistant. She has worked as dancer/rehearsal mistress for The American Dance Machine, Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, Howard Richard & Dancers and Ballet Jorgen. She has also worked for the Judith Marcuse Repertory Dance Company, the Randy Glynn Dance Project and many independent choreographers across Canada and the US. Ms. Wilson’s rich background as dancer, teacher and rehearsal director reflects a lifetime of work with some to the greatest artists of our time, a lifetime reflected in her resonant choreographic voice.

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PAPER Don’t ask me to tell you my story, I don’t like to speak of myself. Dissolve into ink, become ink and a quill and start to write after me. I was born in a cottage of lake water, the larvae there breathed algae, the fishers were netted fish, the villagers wakened the dawn of day and each of them each day dreamed of his field. They were pure, liked rain and sun at the same time. In every shower their sun was born, and in the sunshine their rain. Don’t ask me to tell you my story. I am not that cottage any more, nor reed nor fish, nor lake water. I am not in rain any more, or sun, or morning, or dawn. I’m only a tired and crumpled piece of paper waiting to be discarded in the street.

Heraclea - Bitola, Macedonia

Planetarium dance

Choreographer Debbie Wilson and Kiro Urdin 61

Heraclea - Bitola, Macedonia

Geneve

Planetarium dance performance, celebrating 60 years UN,Geneva 2005

Planetarium dance performances Toronto, Skopje, Heraclea,Ohrid, Geneva, Chikago, Ankara 72

Tanja Vujisik-Todorovska, Aleksandra Mijalkova, Sasha Evtimova, Marija Krstevska, Natasha Nikolova, Biljana Pasharikovska, Kire Pavlov, N

Naomi Lebel, Christy Adamson, Tal Aronson, Melissa Bettio, Aimee Geldard, Anthony Guerra, Chantal Meadows, Siobhan Paton, Almond Small

“Pishta” is my first film shot in 1974 on Place du Tertre in Paris. The protagonist is Hungarian legionnaire who fought in the wars in Chad, Algeria and Indochina. He was the best known vagabond at the famous Montmartre, a friend and favourite character of artists. Pishta was regarded as a classic representative of the bohemian Montmartre free spirit. His warm soul was home for abandoned dogs and hungry birds, and he often shared his poor meal with them. In the end, he left this world as a cosmic energy. One August afternoon he set himself on fire and burned down before the eyes of artists and tourists. It seems that the energy of his soul left patina on the stone tiles of Place du Tertre.

To become a cloud, his soul falling in the rain, bearing the seed of life.Yet at one moment he did think to himself: have I gone mad? Nothing is clear to me any more, and it never will be. His memories were like a broken reel of film with strange, faint images. Some of the pictures were scribbled over with irregular lines, others damaged by the fangs of time. How swiftly his youth and his whole life had passed. The cavaliers of the nocturnal life had long since gone for ever. But his decision had already been made. The flight of three steps, the paving-stones, the wall. Here he found new friends once more. Fate had drawn them to one place. Birds. Dogs. Those bohemians of hunger and alcohol. On the streets there was no water anywhere, not a drop. And they were parched with thirst, drunk with thirst. Each one of them was alone. Each of them lived for the others. Nobody knows how the story of his life began. He had made up his mind to be a friend to everyone. In his soul now lived all souls. The clouds, the rain and the steps. To everything. Even if they proclaimed him an The steps he continued to take, ascending and outsider. As an emigrant of the soul. He travelled on and on. Travelled to where he would descending in life. So was he not a constant traveller, fated to bear the hump of loneliness? never reach. Through the walls of his solitude. Why did he drink? Why did he sleep under the If only he could turn the waters of the rivers into stars, winter and summer, in the cold and in the alcohol! into steam! How much less painfully fog? More and more steps. Towns and cities. would his soul sail in that case! He understood it was his fate to travel in freedom, in time, without Endless paths and roads. The corridors of solitude ... Yet so it continued until he came across the three wife, without children, without a home. steps. He fell in love with them immediately. Had he really once been born? Forever. Passionately. His soul began to ascend Did he have a mother, a father . . . a birthplace, a and descend them. He quivered day and night. sky of his own? It seemed to him that his whole life had taken place in only one day. He didn’t even Breathless, timeless. So began their romance . . . want to know about it. And did the stars know this? And so he began to speak. He talked and talked. About himself. To himself. How many nights he had spent under them! He wanted to announce something to the stars, If only he could have come closer to them! to the steps, to the walls, to the flagstones, to the But the streets stretched out in his soul like an birds. To be close to them. He resolved not to go endless road. Towns came to resemble each other. The highways too. Streets – paved, muddy, twisted, anywhere any more. To stay here. Just here. colourful, broad, narrow. Streets with no horizon. Now the three steps were the temple of the holy words to which he would go. Where he would Yet his steps had their own purpose. tread. He had not come here to leave again just They stepped out of their own accord. They were the steps of his life which was passing. like that. He had come to stay. He had fallen in love for the first time. At last the play of his life Streets without houses, without trees. Only walls had halted to listen to the speech of the traveller and more walls. Paving-stones drawn from the who had said nothing. He talked and talked. womb of the underworld. His music was the wind which journeys everywhere He was convinced that the time that had flown – and why not think of the wind as flights of music. past was a train seized-up on a rusty track. This was the point he had been searching for. Life. The trees of a dessicated life . . . The thirst for life. They were all thirsty, and not But wasn’t all this a delusion? He thought of himself as a shadow moving along roads, through a drop of water in the streets. And so they were towns that no longer existed. In his soul there lived drunk with thirst. rivers, fish, clouds, birds, the winds and the scales. Why did the birds visit him so often?! Why did the dogs bark here?! Everything had its The scales, flights he ascended and descended. own significance. Now downwards towards life, now up into the That is why he was forever thirsty. clouds. He wanted to touch them, to be a bird, That is why he never stopped speaking. flying free in the wind. 87

Place du Tertre,Paris

NOVEL

I am the text of an advertisement: Let’s write a novel together, folks, the novel of our first encounter, the novel of our first love, let’s write together the history of our souls, our hearts. Clear spring water will be born of it. Isn’t it good that everyone writes about everyone, everyone writes about himself? From it the Bible will begin to read the souls of spring’s awakening and to hear what there is within the novel that is written in everyone and in all, in the novel that is written in the joy of its own letters. Let’s write a novel together, folks, the novel of our first encounter, the novel of our first love. Everyone should read me, everyone understand me, everyone should read everyone everyone understand everyone.

The vital advantage of being a poltroon is that one can live under every skin.

The average rules the world and that is why the middle is subjugated.

The circle you belong to defines the hoop around you.

Place du Tertre,Paris Be rare, you are followed by boredom!

Montmartre,Paris

Place du Tertre,Paris

DOGONA The film was shot in Bandiagara, an area in Mali. It is about a mystical tribe called Dogon. Before them the Tellem lived in their territory, a red-skinned people. The Dogon believe they were bird-people who occasionally come back transformed into sand storms and disappear again. The Dogon believe that the universe is the work of their god Amma, who is also the creator of death. Actually, he killed the first man and thus death was born. The incident happened near the Juba mountain massif. Before this event, there was no death. To mark the event, a ritual called Sigui is held once every 60 years throughout the whole Bandiagara country. On that day, a model of death with a large carved mask containing the spirit of Ammaâ€™s first son, Nommo, embodied as a serpent, dances together with the other members of the tribe, that way paying tribute to their god.

Where were they to go. By water and by land. There was sunshine everywhere. Every day. And stars too. Sometimes mothers collected the stars in wooden vessels and gave them to their children. To the north was the River Niger, and it seemed to the oldest Dogon that at the time of his brother’s funeral Nomo was whispering to him and making it known to him: There, in the north, lies Bandiagara. On the river bank the crocodiles are waiting to carry you across to the other side. To the chaos on the steep, stony bank. There are the rocks of the Tellem, the bird people, the great wizards of the realm of spells. Indeed, they appear from time to time as a sandstorm with a herd of wild animals or with the white fox. That’s how the Dogons got to Bandiagara. Here in the massif of the Yugo the first Siqui began, in honour of the first one to die. The masked dancers dance every sixty years recalling the moment when death was first born. Olobolu, the dancer with the big snake mask, leapt about with a marvellous lightness while his soul was full of Ama, Nomo and the eight ancestors. It seemed as if the prayer of the oldest Dogon was issuing from the great mask as he lifted up his arms towards Nomo and the other ancestors. He prayed that rain would fall, that the fields sown with onions, rice and corn would be watered. That the pregnant women would have easy births. They believed in the power of the Almighty, who had succeeded in uniting space and time. He knew from what his grandfather had told him that only the body can die, not the spirit, it was a part of Ama. Neither could it die, nor be born. He gazed at the sacred paths. The spirits are here, around us. They see us, they love us, but they also punish our sins. That’s why you must always take care. Bandiagara, Mali

Everything has a soul. Even death. Life and death live side by side, like the earth and the sky. He went barefoot all his life. He felt neither stones, nor sand, nor thorns. His skin was as hard as the drought. The eight totems protected him from everything. Even from thirst. Less and less rain fell. Sometimes, in Bandiagara, during the days of the Tellems, the great wizards, there were herds of antelopes, lions and leopards. But they’d all vanished because of the drought. The plants, insects and birds too. The sand had become their graveyard. Everyone was praying for rain. Even the dead. From time to time the Tellems appeared as a sandstorm, accompanied by their vanished herds, or in company with the white fox. But the Dogons remained here, their spirit survived. The rice continued to grow and ripen to harvest. The onions too. The skilled hands of the Dogons went on fashioning figurines and masks. The mornings, when the darkness still clung to the landscape, the infants, grown one with their mothers’ backs, mutely watched the first blows of the mattocks. The fields had to be sown. The first rains had only just fallen. And their older brothers and sisters were still sleeping without a care in the world under the mantle of the stars. Then his grandfather went on with his tale: Before the time of Doyogu-Seru, the first man to die, death had not existed. That was why the Dogons made the great snake mask, in honour of the birth of death. When you were born – continued his grandfather –the rains dried up for three years. The sun grew bigger each day. By night new stars emerged.

It began to seem to the Dogons as if they slept on stars, there were so many of them. The women stopped wailing over death and instead of weeping over it they wept over thirst. But the dancers were here, the masks, the figurines with their arms raised to Ama, to Nomo, the dead ancestors whose spirits, living here beside them, the eight living totems which protected them – the living power of Nyama. Thirst gave way in face of that protecting power. So the plants did not dry up, the infants grew, only the birds didn’t fly, the air was too hot. Soon heavy rains fell. The livestock were watered after such a long time when not a drop of rain had fallen. Dolo remembered when his grandfather had died. It was May. The masked dancers wove in a spiral around their house. The dead body of his ancestor was placed in a freshly hollowed-out tree trunk on the verandah, and in a trance the oldest Dogon explained, by means of mime, the symbols and the genesis of the cosmos. Night had long since fallen and it was as if the almighty Ama was riding on its shoulders. At one moment it seemed to him that the eight totems were sitting on his grandfather’s body, exchanging greetings with the spirit that had not yet left his body. Dolo was captivated by the dancers, the masks, the figurines, by the mannikin of death, and the sacrifice was brought out, that meant that Nomo was here too, Ama was there. And all the ancestors. Space had merged into a single point. The stars, wind, fire, water and time too. From the other side the sound of tools could be heard. One of the neighbours was completing the sculpture which was to be sacrificed. On the other side of the fence the children were drawing something incomprehensible. That morning they had hoped that the white fox would pass across the picture so that the holy ones could figure out the augury.

And the children drew and played innocently and purely as their childlike hearts bade them. Dolo recalled the words of his grandfather. Death has a soul, he said, everyone has a body and several souls, and a living power, and is born and lives in water. It is everything. When a baby is born, it drinks water through the milk. Before death the old people ask for water. Everything is born in it: light, wind, earth, even fire. Plants, insects, birds. The soul. Even the deserts are created by water. At night, when everyone is asleep, water is transformed into a bird with enormous wings that flies over Bandiagara. In the morning it vanishes with the sun. And when Ama decides the sand can be transformed into rain, the desert into a sea. Life flows for a time, joy returns, men love only water more than their women. But when it vanishes, fear puts in an appearance, pain, hunger, thirst... Dolo felt happy at all this. His soul laughed. Death seemed to him to be the shadow of Sirius, lying upon the body of his grandfather. He rejoiced in the dancers’ airy leaping. And the spirits of all the other dead were there somewhere in the offing. At dusk they would have to set off for the marvellous land of the ancestors, to the realm of the holy spirits. Everything was everlasting that night, the spirits could neither be born nor die. The universe of immortality was gathered into the eye of Ama.

Bandiagara, Mali

Dolo

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A new type of racism â€“ party colour.

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P L A N E T A R I U M f i l m ,

left Skopje in October 1973, and, once in Paris, I headed for the Pigalle metro station. The air down there was heavy and humid. It reminded one of the old age of the metropolis. In the pockets of my army jacket I had a bottle of water, my shaving kit, a few cans, a mirror and some other trinkets. I spent three nights there with tramps and other vagrants. Every now and then a police officer or some other official would warn us that sleeping is not allowed in the metro. But none of us paid attention. On the fourth day I left and headed for the Place du Tertre.

ru n n in g tim e 57 min

In those days Paris was all charm and saga. It appeared as if it had transformed the proud Gallic idyll into eternity. I was under the impression that everybody loved everybody. That afternoon, among other painters, I met a friend from my home town. I spent the next three months in a cellar that he vacated for me, free of charge. He dropped by every day just to leave his painting gear there. The cellar had an earth floor, there was no electricity, no water, no toilet. It was damp everywhere. The mattress smelled of mold. After some twenty days I began to feel chest pains. It must be tuberculosis, I thought. And yet I was lucky â€“ I had a roof over my head. From time to time, during the night, an insect or rat would run over me.. The darkness of the cellar gripped my soul like a steel clamp. But all this had already become part of my life.

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I soon started studying painting, and later, film directing. I earned my living doing all kinds of manual labour. As time went by I made a living doing portraits or silhouettes. Then I lost my work permit. This way of doing business was forbidden. It was then that I finally decided to devote myself to painting only. I witnessed and participated in a life full of cigarettes, alcohol, sleepless nights and frequent brawls in bohemian Montmartre. But I also saw the great friendship between us, the painters, and the people who lived in the neighbourhood. In those days glorious Montmartre was the soul of Paris. We painted by day and lived out our youth by night. The thirst for friendship hovered above us.

Michael had told me many times in Paris about their love affair. She lived in a luxurious apartment near Central Park. After a short buzz, the door opened and an endless dialogue ensued between Michael and Alberta. It seemed to me that certain coldness was creeping in. We were tired and hungry, but more than that, we felt helpless and miserable. It seemed as if we had come from some underworld without the right to see the light. I had a feeling that I was becoming alienated from myself. It looked as if we were both entering the hallway of some polar chamber. This strange woman was depriving me in a very painful way of my vision of New York and America. And I thought: Am I indeed becoming alienated from myself?

Three wonderful tramps and a white dog named Pony lived with us. Montmartre will remember them all as the four princes of the free spirit of the small square. Soon death began to separate them. The first tramp, who went by the name of Napoleon, died of thrombosis on a staircase. Pishta, a former Hungarian legionnaire, set himself on fire in broad daylight and burned before our very eyes. Andre died of pneumonia and Pony joined them a short while later. One morning this unique stray dog was run down by a car. It seemed as if the death of the four veterans marked the end of the warm soul of the old square. The painters were becoming middle-aged. The morning greetings were no longer what they used to be. The walls of distance were rising like skyscrapers. Although separated by only a yard, we would not exchange a single word, for weeks. And whether it was because of jadedness or fatigue, there was ever less friendship among us. And the years went by. The Place du Tertre was advancing towards its deep autumn.

Passing through many American cities, Michael and I arrived in New Orleans. I was running out of money. We were planning to spend the night in a deserted boat. However, a friend of ours introduced us to a lady who agreed to give us a room for three dollars. Madam Olson had been a Hollywood starlet in the 1930s. The walls of her apartment were plastered with photographs from her young days. The glory of her bygone beauty loomed over all those photographs. The apartment had three rooms. In each room there was a TV set and many lightbulbs. She immediately warned us that in her home they had to be turned on at all times. The windows in all the rooms were walled up. The sight excited hopelessness. It seemed as if Madame Olson had painted a fresco of her loneliness in this sealed space. Were the lightbulbs and the TV sets which were always turned on the windows of her soul? And yet, during that night, as we were trying to get some sleep, it seemed that the old age of this lonely woman bounced off the walls of her strange home. The next morning, Madame Olson prepared a breakfast which consisted of an omelette made with one egg and some onion, and a slice of bread. She shared her meal with us. Later, I was long haunted by the great soul of this lonely old woman. I can feel her presence close to me, like the gentle mother of all mothers.

My agent Michael and I arrived in New York toward the end of 1988. We were in good spirits. Before our departure we had received a postcard from Alberta inviting us to visit her. 104

Paris. A late November night, and it had not stopped raining for three days. Through my studio window I watched the dark silhouette of an exhausted dog. Its slow stride revealed its old age. To the left stood a container full of garbage. I could catch a glimpse of my latest painting in the depths of my studio. I watched it silently. It was worn out and without soul. It looked like a squeezed mass hurled into space. I was helpless and lonely in my despair. I wanted to destroy it, to burn it up, but I did not have the strength to walk the distance from the window to the painting.

My dear child

Today is November 6, 1996. This morning I touched for the very first time the tomb of Jesus Christ and wept for the soul of my mother, of my father and for all poor souls. The Son of God, crucified and eternal, was above me on the cross. It seemed that the pain of Golgotha hovered above the candle smoke. Then I passed by the Wailing Wall, and the scent of eternity was in the Jerusalem air. That night I had a premonition. I realized Paris. Several years had gone by... that I must burn my Planetarium in eternal One night I was wandering from bar to bar. It was Jerusalem in order to resurrect the spirit of August. The streets were deserted and nothing was happening. When I returned to my studio I had no a new offspring, Planetarium. wish to do anything. There was not enough breathing space. It was filled with things. I began to look for some space to begin painting, but I could not see it. I became depressed. I was distraught and I hated myself from the depths of my soul. I started breaking and burning everything that was within my reach. I threw the radio, the table and the mattress through the window. For the next three years I slept on boards. The empty room began to resemble an erased space. Paints and canvases were littered all over the place. I tried to understand time, I tried to caress it. I imagined it as a prince who was now on a ship, now in a desert, now on a cloud... Then I watched how it ran on for years on and across different crossroads. Through the archives of my memory I wanted to reach the freedom of its omnipotence. And I still keep travelling and trying to reach the universe of its freedom. But time begins once again to drift away...

Donna Urdinâ€™s first birthday 105

Planetarium painting performance (1996/97)

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Aphorisms, aphorisms, a compressed language form which is too stingy to say more, but it is the richest when saying the least. Therefore, aphorisms imposed themselves as a replacement for a classical scenario. As a result of that, the materials recorded in Japan, China, Bolivia, Belgium, France and Germany got a freer form. Trains run constantly, we do not know if dogs perform a human role or people perform a canine role. Because of this we do not know who should be whose best friend. In train carriages there are the closed eyes of dream or the agony of daily fatigue. Time eats space, and man is a part of both. Planet Earth is a black hole that swallows itself and trains continue to move with or without people.

Feel good in your own skin; years decide under it.

The friend who only has friends is not your best friend.

And now let us talk about films for a while. They are framing me for a show trial.

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Knokke, Belgium

Cannes, France 110

Cannes, France

Cannes, France 111

Eindhoven, Netherlands

Cannes, France 112

Cannes, France

Bangkok, Thailand 113

Bolivia

Knokke, Belgium 114

Bolivia

Knokke, Belgium 115

WATER AND FIRE The world has turned into water and fire. Or into flood and wildfire. In this dramatic moment of human history, when the ice surface of Antarctica turns into land, when in the streets of cities rivers begin to flow, or water collects in ponds, when temperatures ominously remind us that planet Earth will soon be turned into planet Fire, it is obvious that everything has gone awry. A man plays the main role of a predator, like a ruthless screenwriter and director who knows no boundaries. During this incomprehensible spree driven by megalomaniac greed for money, the levels of toxins grow, the air is polluted, and the same goes for water. All this has a direct effect on fish that live in those waters and swallow all that plastic, the animals which are left without the ground beneath their legs, and the birds which lose the clean air beneath their wings. Everywhere seas and oceans rise of concrete jungles, buildings, undergrounds, roads, highways, warehouses for chemicals and weapons, abandoned vehicles gravesitesâ€Ś Everything is in a tight space, because everything rises. The bullet of human greed brutally kills everything in its path, suppressing the planetary cry to rescue the beautiful planet Earth.

Friends are like teeth, they fall off one after another in time.

He is very good at monkey business: he was an ape and now he is a man.

Carnivores are bad because they eat meat; herbivores are good because they eat flowers.

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Kenya

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Tanzania

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TWO TIMES “Two Times” is the second film from my trilogy dedicated to the African savannah. The main line in the script moves between the sun and the rain or rather between life and death. Life is born with the sun and rain, and dies without them. Therefore, man in the final moments of his life looks at the sky, because it is there that the sun and rain are born, but that same sky can be their grave as well. I must mention that each year two to three million gnus cross the river Mara between Kenya and Tanzania. For thousands of years the most fascinating spectacle in nature happens in this place. It all looks like a unique theatre spectacle in which predators stalk their prey, but thanks to new pastures and hope many animal herds widen their own horizons. Here, everything is united, it is the end or the continuation, or it is randomness which determines the fortune or misfortune. Maybe the tree branches hold the history of the heaven and earth, or the secrets of the ancient man who lived there. And how strange are their trunks. One minute wriggled, the other twisted or broken in two by thunder and lightning. Trees that grow, wither, fall under ground without having the history of their life cut. And here time runs so quick as if it was smaller than a drop. Are there grasses made of elephant and gnu herds, mountains made of underground rivers, and sky made of earth? There are no rules here. Everything is all, and all is in everything. The soul of the savannah travels day and night as an unknown traveller full of secrets. And while it moves, it lives like an amoeba, it self-fertilizes together with its marvellous world. As if God borrowed His body to her so that everyone is inside. Soon strong rain might pour, or a sand dust might rise behind some unwanted vehicle, as a foreboding of something about to happen. But in a short while everything will quiet down. It will quiet down in its calmness. And the nights can stop, they can grow dark. And all that was in that darkness, seems that it is no more in the morning. The image of the yesterday is pale and life enters the game once again. In that continent of life two worlds live side by side, the world of the sun and the world of the rain. Actually nothing dies here, everything continues into the next generation. Still, the heat doesn’t want to know anything about it and in a moment all can expire, can extinguish in the leaden sheath of drought. Then time begins to eat itself, it dies. But as soon as rain fall, it is as if nothing happened. Road to rain, road to grass, road to life.

Extinct roads which are born again. Afterlife at the crossroads of death and a new birth of the roads of life. It is a magic stick with two ends; everything is born with the sun and rain and everything dies without them. Circle of life. Road of love. Everydayness that won’t be repeated. Here every day is a new life. Every day is lived forever. In the morning when the savanna wakes up, the dance of the day begins. Everything moves, hops, or stops for a while wonderingly and continues again. Does anyone know how to describe the misenscène records of that fascination? And a yellow covering of flowers will remind us that it is spring now and life grows together with the grass. But it grows in the hell of future heats. They know how to conquer all. To transform the savannah in an unclear mass which like an extended fungus tiredly sticks to its shadow. And when the clouds descend low and narrow down the space between the sky and the earth, and there is an eagle flying nearby, be aware that something will happen. And who can tell what happens in the souls of the hyenas? They run and run. They pass each other, go and return again. Everywhere around them are roads. As if they were born on them. Roads of roads, crossroads of life which roll as a ball for which no one knows where it started from and where it will stop. From time to time some subdued laugh of a hyena can be heard, looking distrustfully left and right and continuing again. It will continue along its imagined paths, or it will join other hyenas in case they run along the same path. But aren’t the paths spirits of the sun, rain and time moving under their feet, or is the uncertainty of life reflected in their worried eyes only? Still, sometimes they are startled by the sound of wheels from some vehicle, to warn them that everything comes from the sky and ends underground, just as the first acquaintance and the last goodbye. At noon when the sun is vertically high and the engine of animal buzz turns off, a weary silence begins in which only dry trees can breathe safely. But in the evening it is as if nothing ever happened. The everyday birth of life will begin again. In this countdown scale maybe some miraculous potion will bring the man back to the savannah, to the prehistory of his soul, in order to share his common home with everyone; without cities, streets, concrete, erasing roads, crossroads, frontiers... Only then will the savannah return its skin on its own wounded body. And through all that the wilderness full of love and uncertainty will be born again. When the heart of nights again fills with moving shadows of the trees, this world won’t sleep and will wait with an open soul for the sun to be born. 123

Tanzania

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The earthâ€™s in a tight spot - everythingâ€™s on the increase.

KILIMANJARO Below the peak of Kilimanjaro bloomed the last rose, it message gleamed like a ray of light. Poets gathered from everywhere in honour of the life that had been born, and each poet sang a poem of eternal love for the rose that had bloomed.

Animals have a single party parliament; the party of wild animals has run out of members.

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DROPS “Tomorrow it will rain,” an anxious raindrop whispers to her sister. “Tomorrow we will leave forever, some new cloud awaits us.”

Ideal women do exist, but beyond the horizon.

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ANTELOPE How sere the grass. The antelope ran through the golden valley of life.

Watching the birds fly freely, the emigrant wished to become a migrant.

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LIFE AND DEATH “Life and Death” is the story of a friendship between a gnu and a buffalo. Being born close to each other on the territory of the Maasai Mara reserve, Kenya they became friends. After that, each of them follows its own life path. Time passes and they grow old. Shortly before the end of its life, driven by the instinct of death the buffalo heads towards the banks of the river Mara hoping to see its friend gnu for the last time. But the gnu died a few hours before the buffalo arrives, and finding its friend dead, the buffalo died the same day beside it. When rain fell and the soil by the river turned to mud and small water pools, the gnu herds were already headed for Mara, leaving the trail of their hoofs, which the sun burned into the dried up land. This was the novel of life which has been repeating in the Serengeti for millions of years. Each year they would cross the river and return back again. Under the tropical sun the rich landscape full of life extended and shrank as a luxury net spread out in the huge expanse hiding the secret of how it all happens. And so does our story begin. Before the great migration began, near Kilimanjaro a little gnu and a little buffalo were born. The proximity in which they lived made them friends, without them even knowing it, while they ran each with its own herd. Their friendship simply remained a secret to the end of their lives. There was joy, their youth was easy and they were part of the happiness of the savannah. But the happiness of the two small creatures did not last long.

He ran and ran along the marathon of life and under his hoofs the rogue grass watched the dark colossus as a condensed black cloud flying over it as a rounded bird. Ah, those flowers and shadows, shadows of memories, shadows of hope that their friendship was hiding in the swaying twigs, in the vast meadows full of grass. Everybody was carrying the fate of his life in himself. But they somehow knew that towards the end of their lives they would meet again. To try and find in their hearts the word farewell. To remind one another that they grew up together, next to each other when they were young. The instinct was leading them both towards the river now. The gnu with the goal of crossing it over and the buffalo to say goodbye to him for the last time. On the road to the river near its bank, in a small green pond he met a jolly, curious duckling. Their two good souls befriended almost instantly, as if they knew each other forever. He moved slowly along the edge of the pond and the duckling skillfully hopped first left then right. Nobody knew how that happened in the first place. And why was it necessary to be known? He no longer felt his old age. In the mist of that near-death act the form of friendship quietly floated around. Suddenly it seemed to him that the dead body of his friend turned into music that was coming towards him. The music of remembrance. And maybe it was the eternal silence that had already began to cover them both.

After that shadows appeared, horrendously tremFirst, the mother of the little buffalo was torn apart bling on the ground, followed by a small red by a pack of lions, after which exactly the same flower over the skull of his friend and trees trunks thing happened to the gnu’s mother. Thus each of whose swaying enriched the tropical wind, closing them set out on its life’s journey. That is the eternal with the tree of their friendship which ended uprule of the savannah. That same savannah often is wards with its crown towards the sky... the birth mother and the death mother as well. And the hippos were under water one moment and When the rain season came the river poured out of the very next they presented themselves as small itself with increased anger and then, when the sun movable islands. scorched the scenery it squeezed itself, shrunken and powerless to the bottom of its riverbed. After several years the feeling of death brought Then the grass and the small trees surrounding them back together once more. It happened here, Mara, together with the animals anxiously looked on the banks of Mara, among the crocodiles, the for salvation without knowing where to find it. hippos, the gushing water and few tree-trunks The gnu has long lost his herd and all that was left thrust into it, ominously staring around. between him and the river was the savannah. His instinct led him towards the river, towards his Previously, the great gnu herds were already on childhood friend. There he had the biggest chance the other side of the river. to meet him again. Even for the last time. His aged In the distance the wobbly line of the river outlegs barely carried his huge torso and his horns lined on the horizon. which were the most beautiful in the whole savannah. 129

But the death monster has long been crawled up into his body as a deadly metal insect. Next, it seemed to him that the sand was a ghost come here to take him elsewhere, but did not know where he would be carried off, towards the sky or under the river bottom. But was the river water magic that strongly attracted him, or it was a false hope that the same river water will take him to the other side where he will be safer? The gnus that had crossed the river earlier were already far away. But the water enticed him. The river which was grown into the savannahâ€™s soul was the last hope that he will be able to reach the gnu herds once again. He was not even thinking about the gushing river and he simply voluntary gave himself to destiny. Nevertheless, the gushing water, the steep stone blocks and his broken leg had kept him prisoner forever. It was only a matter of time when the fatal hour will come upon him. The curtain of life readily waited to come down.

The water there was troubled with mud on the bottom and from both sides of the slit there were short stone monoliths. When he stopped short at the first part of the small slit, he noticed right away that the river continued to carry the bodies of the dead gnus. Nevermind, he carried on fighting until death. Still death won. It won but it lost the win to be present at the last moment of a friendship. The buffalo was already there but it was too late. Their soul was forever filled with blackness. And without even being aware of it he suddenly felt the hot blood running down his nostrils. And he just stood and stood there. So mute as if he had marble running through his veins. He had blizzards and horrible winds of remembrance blowing through his heart filled with pain. Ah, where was his youth now, where was the swaying grass of the savannah? Did everything have to happen this way? During that final moment he suddenly thought there was music coming out of the gnuâ€™s body and it was moving towards him, music written by the hand All of a sudden the scenery thickened. There was of their friendship. And so he too found his relief the kingdom of the lions and the other predators before death. He climbed a little bit higher on the and only stronger animals went into the low trees bank, looked for the last time towards his friend or shrubs. The wind here swayed the branches and became part of eternity. Forever. But, old age mixed together with shadows and one would get has started to pull him backwards long time ago. an impression that their rustle together with the As he was moving towards the shore he stopped in wind was a sinister sign of something bad about front of a pond ingrown with green grass and there to happen. But still the strongest of the savannah he befriended a small bird. colossi carelessly went in there. Maybe those The dialogue began instantly. The small gentle were the houses of the savannah, only without creature with its delicate wings hopped joyfully any windows or doors, and those that got inside left and right next to the strong giant. them could disappear in a second. It was as if And his soul was filled with warmth and pure here there were no interchanging seasons of rain goodness towards it. and sun, instead there was only the perennial wind After that the buffalo continued along his way. season. Sometimes it was mild and gentle and He could see the river bank showing itself on the sometimes cruelly hidden among the branches landscape. Passing through the fog of destiny, which trembled from its breath. without knowing how it all happened in the first place, he found himself in front the dead body But the shrieks of the eagles were letting him of his childhood friend. The gnu was lying in the know that now he was the main drama for everysmall river slit, on the stone monolith. And they body around. The crocodiles, as if deeply asleep, both wanted to meet before they died, they wanted secretly waited for their live feast. For some of it so much. Over them vertically was the tropical the eagles the corpses of the dead gnus were more sun and under the buffalo was the elongated shadow than enough but some of them were tempted by of his neck directed towards his dead friend. his movement. On the small island he felt as if in Swimming powerlessly along the gushing river an opened prison, squeezed by the hope to survive the fate of the gnu was writing its history. There on one side and death on the other. were crocodiles on both sides of the river so the On the sand were the vultures and on the shore exhausted gnu went towards the water where the were the crocodiles, both of them watching their unmovable hippos were. prey. His feeble body and broken leg were nearing They were now protecting him from the crocodiles their end. He was surrounded only by vertigos and instead of attacking him in defense of their terridespair. Everyone around him was preparing tory. They must have felt that he was completely to give him the fatal blow. As time passed his hope powerless and weak. was disappearing bit by bit. He stayed there for quite a while until he was chased away from the exile asylum by a young So he decided to do the inevitable. hippo. And he had nowhere left to go. He started the small river slit towards the shore. All he had left in front of him was the small island. 130

Now was the time when he must face the death monster. On the left and on the right were the dead bodies of the gnus and around them were the vultures which were all over their prey. Some of the eagles would unpredictably fly over his head, hinting his immediate death. And nothing was clear to him. Should he go forward or backward on the island. And the island itself was so small. In a moment he would turn left and right searching for a salvation and a brief moment later he would again become aware of the destiny that awaits him. In that part of the river, Mara had its secret. Sometimes the sand from the island would drop under the water, sometimes it would emerge in small piles of earth and sometimes it would turn into an elongated surface of sand. It had nothing on it, not even a single grass grew on it. Only grey sand controlled by the mighty hippos which were often accompanied by two small ducks. But now something unpredictable happened. Hundreds of dead gnu bodies were floating in the river, and some of them would end up washed out on the small island. And so the drama of this unique landscape was enriched. The sharp eyes of the vultures could recognize the rich prey of their future feast from afar. They lowered one after the other, jumped here and there or moved as if they were living ghosts among the dead bodies. When it rained and the ground around the river turned into mud and small ponds, the great gnu herds were already on their way to Mara, leaving their hoof prints in the moist mud. And after that the sun often sealed them into small holes in the dried earth. That view in the wonderful Serengeti has been repeating itself for millions of years. They would pass it and then return again, here, under the tropical sun and the vast grasslands full of life. All this secret shrank and expanded as a glorious net stretched between light and darkness, hiding inside itself how everything happens. That is how our story begins. We are at the beginning of the great migration and all this happens near Kilimanjaro. Here a small gnu and a buffalo were born. The fact that their herds were so close to each other made them friends without even knowing they were. Running side by side made the wind of friendship enter their hearts and stay there forever. The joy was there and naivety made its thing. They were running around carelessly, protected by their herds. Tired and thirsty he was moving through the valley filled with skeletons of different animals and their heartbreaking face expressions were a mute witness of their last spasm before death took over.

He was so tired that he wasnâ€™t aware whether his body or his spirit was the one that walked the road to the river. Anyway, in the end he managed to notice that he was now walking along the river bank. Just a short moment ago, in front of a small shrub, with worry in his eyes he looked at his wounded leg for the last time. From time to time he would stop and look at it carefully as if something could be done. Realizing nothing could be done he would continue, helplessly limping away. And the mighty river was here. He was afraid that that same river was going to take him down to its water insides with all its power. And he knew that he had no power left for anything at all. The only thing he knew was that he must try to get across the river. Even if it was for the last time. He felt the dry wind in his nostrils telling him that there was drought coming. And the gnu herds from both banks of the river were long gone. There were no gnus or other animals around that were preparing to cross the river. So he would have to be he only victim if it came to that. But hope overcame fear and he just went into the water, exhausted and with an injured leg. Under him was the water which was pulling him in the deep and above him were the wet rocks, and their slippery, insecure surface. On both sides of the river there were crocodiles and near the small island the hippos were lying around, completely still. Suddenly something unpredictable happened. Instead of attacking him in defense of their territory, the hippos actually shielded him from the crocodiles. He just stood like that for hours and hours without even moving a bit, and it seemed as if time stood still. He stood hopelessly like that in the shallow water and his legs were almost glued from the mud. From time to time he would look left and than right after which he would look hopelessly into the water. Inside the riverbed the water was pierced by the underwater rocks and trees, and the dead bodies of the gnus that didnâ€™t make it to the other side were piled up as morbid forms of painful outcries. The river in front of him was a bridge and an abyss at the same time. To cross it or to fall down in it. Along its left and right bank deeply carved in itself, here and there were few bigger rocks or parts of some rocks thrown around without any order, as well as fallen tropical trees trunks at which there could be seen a dead corpse of a stuck gnu or even several of them piled up one over another as if they had an agreement to travel away together. And that was the way in which that furious landscape, talking about the pain before the death spasm of the animals, captured the drama of the despair which happened here before. And the river ruthlessly continued to carry away what has happened in it just moments before. 131

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SAHARA In the Sahara the last bird was flying, the insects were already dead. In the Sahara the drought was growing like a blue, crystal net. The Sahara was dying in that final bird.

Confident inside, sovereign – outside. Stop shooting at me, some of your bullets are duds. The lion is the king of the animals, and the queen is ruller. There’s a philosopher with universal wisdom - he’s called Old Age. Everything flows, everything changes, but there is less and less drinking water.

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a film by

Kiro Urdin

STEPS

Original Music by Venko Serafimov Editor Vladimir Petrovski - Karter

STEPS This film was shot in the fashionable city of Knokke in Belgium. The entire action of the film takes place in a small space between a gallery and the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. One day, while I was drinking coffee from a small plastic cup, quite unintentionally I began to imagine the small plastic cup as the soul of a little helpless being. And is there anything that can inflict tremendous pain of the soul, except injustice? And so that little plastic cup of coffee left in the sun, rain, wind and sand that was constantly moving back and forth was experiencing everyday human destiny. At one point someone would kick it away, at a second one a bicycle wheel would pass over it, at a third one the wind would relocate itâ€Ś. It is more than obvious that this resembled human destiny. Well, isnâ€™t life a set of steps?

When you leave through the doors of time, do not expect to return through them.

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A CHILD The child set out for the end of the world wanting to meet God. The child reached the heart of God, reached his motherâ€™s tender breast.

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Kiro Urdin & Gerard H. Meulensteen Knokke, Belgium

LENS What can I say to the lens! It looks at me and you. Isnâ€™t it my eye, isnâ€™t it your eye? What can I say to the lens? It looks at us, me and you. Which of us should be first to speak to it?

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What is your star sign? â€“ Mine is a question mark.

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Atelier Knokke, Belgium

Judging by my instinct, they are right to call me an animal.

Do not rush with the first step; the second is already by inertia.

Do you see now how difficult it is to put it in words instead of phrases?

The environment would remain healthy if people did not descend from humans.

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Atelier Knokke, Belgium

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STANDARD The man was standardly mad. When there were clouds in the standard The man was standardly mad. How many madmen in clouds there were! What the clouds wanted was standard rain, but the rain fell ever harder.

Exotic woman (watercolors, 35 x25 cm) 148

Magical form (oil on canvas, 180 x120 cm) 149

After the first, everything is average.

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POEMS Poet, do you know how to write poems? I donâ€™t, but is there a poet who does? Poet, set out on the road to your soul, there lies the secret you seek.

Atelier Knokke, Belgium

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BRIDGE If you donâ€™t come across me on the bridge I am already water in your river, flowing unheard in your riverbed. But there are the meadows, the peasants gathering in the last of the harvest. Your hair is as golden as a stalk of wheat pigeons and partridges nest in it, in the womb of the autumn that is being born in its ripeness. But there is the city, twisting and struggling without as much as a breath. And I move wearily through it wanting to pause awhile to see you, to greet the pigeons and the partridges in your hair. Yet you cannot wait any longer, hurrying intently youâ€™re heading for the bridge, for the bridge on an unknown river which flows elsewhere.

Atelier Knokke, Belgium

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For me, the painting is discovering the truth. The feeling is unrepeatable. In painting the feeling is unrepeatable and when I paint I turn off my thoughts in the sense of the rational, giving primacy to emotion and the painter’s adventure. It might be unsuccessful, but it is most important for it to be something pure, genuine. It has to be a child of love. I paint every painting out of “nothing”, I begin it out of nothing. During painting many problems arise which need to be solved and by an instinct, by a feeling, I move towards that result called painting and in principle I consider that there is a parallel between life and painting. The most important thing is to know when to begin and when to stop. The painter does not know the moment in which he will find out the truth. Whether that truth is to be revealed, whether he will reach that substance called “painting”, that is a great unknown. This might well be the instigator which makes the author move further from his own realizations and his own feelings, so that through the picture itself he can answer the question about what can be called A PICTURE. Kiro Urdin Skopje, 1984

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Adopt another form nobody notices you.

Everyone thirsts for water only love is thursty for fire.

Make no comment on stupidity, it lacks all content. Whatever stage youâ€™re at, thatâ€™s your horizon. The woman we conquer with the first move is a lost chance.

The space youâ€˜re moving in is empty, your light has nothing to reflect in.

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Judge the sublime, the rest is error-free. Since I stopped erring I have stopped growing. Sharp minds think regularly while sensible minds think at the right time. Point by point the universe.

Think freely about the freedom of thought.

Think well and long - writing is a swift process.

Kiro Urdin in his Studio 159

The Trumpeter (watercolour 55x75 cm)

Double Face (watercolour 55x75 cm) 160

The Pianist (watercolour 55x75 cm)

Michaelâ€™s soul (watercolour 55x75 cm) 161

Drama (watercolour, 180x105 cm) 162

Feeling of Surprise (watercolour, 58x85 cm)

Dogon Woman (watercolour, 115x77 cm) Jazz Musician (watercolour, 35x50 cm)

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Nucleus (watercolour, 25x35 cm)

Past (watercolour, 25x45 cm) Maya Woman (oil on canvas, 100x80 cm)

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Enigma (watercolour, 75x55 cm)

Spring Woman (watercolour, 75x55 cm)

Caribbean Princess (oil on canvas, 80x100 cm)

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Rhino (oil on canvas, 170x150 cm)

Green Garden (oil on canvas, 200x300 cm)

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Interior of an Exterior (oil on canvas, 150x120 cm)

Spring Day (oil on canvas, 80x60 cm)

Aspen (oil on canvas, 200x300 cm)

Wall Street Impresion (oil on canvas, 170x200 cm) Piano bar (oil on canvas, 170x200 cm)

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Europe (oil on canvas, 600x200 cm)

War of the spirits (oil on canvas, 170x280 cm)

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Experimental Music (oil on canvas, 200x300 cm)

(oil on canvas, 200x300 cm)

(oil on canvas) Steps of Time (oil on canvas, 200x400 cm)

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Lyrical take off (watercolour, 151x100 cm) 170

Spiral (oil on canvas, 120x150cm)

Nymbo story (acrylic, 50x36 cm)

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Red Signals (oil & acryl on canvas, 180x240 cm)

Eastern Light (oil & acryl on canvas, 180 x 120 cm) 172

Cuzco (oil on canvas, 158 x 130 cm)

Fire of Love (oil on canvas, 135x90 cm) 173

Crystal Movement (oil & acryl on canvas, 160 x 120 cm) 174

Red Sea (oil on canvas, 200x330 cm)

Futuristic City (oil on canvas, 200x300 cm)

Futuristic Man (oil on canvas, 180 x 130 cm) Dogona (oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm)

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Together forever (oil on canvas, 160 x 140 cm)

Volume and Space (oil on canvas, 150 x 130 cm) Biodiversity (oil on canvas, 150 x 190cm)

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Planetarium Dance (oil on canvas, 300 x 400 cm)

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Expirience (acrylic, 150 x 110 cm)

Line Play (watercolors, 60 x 40 cm)

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Micro universe (acrylic, 150 x 110 cm)

Forms (acrylic, 150 x 110 cm)

Man of The Green River (acrylic, 150 x 110 cm)

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Opera (oil on canvas, 160 x 140 cm)

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Coco island (oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm)

Pharaon Times (oil on canvas, 130 x 150 cm)

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Florence (oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm) 184

Galaxy Man (oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm) 185

Red Circles (oil & acryl on canvas, 150 x 120 cm)

Conecting (oil & acryl on canvas, 150 x 120 cm) 186

Phoenix (oil & acryl on canvas, 180 x 120 cm)

Blue tendress (oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm)

Aliance (oil & acryl on canvas, 180 x 120 cm) 187

Enigmatic Woman (oil & acryl on canvas, 150 x 120 cm) 188

Mandela day (oil & acryl on canvas, 150 x 120 cm) 189

Grey Matter (oil on canvas, 180 x 120 cm) 190

Passenger (oil & acryl on canvas, 180 x 120 cm)

Amazon (oil on canvas, 176x128 cm) Third Dimension (oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm)

My Truth (oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm)

Structure (oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm) Corral Sea (oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm)

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First Emotion (oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm)

Freedom (oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm)

Flame of Love (acrylic, 40 x 25 cm)

Human (oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm)

Matter Close up (oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm)

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Game (oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm)

Good Thought (oil on canvas, 170 x 120 cm) 194

Feeling (oil on canvas, 170 x 120 cm)

Abstract Vibes (oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm) 195

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Yellow Secret (oil on canvas, 200x300 cm)

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Sculptures Sculpture is the third dimension of things. When surface wraps around itself, or when it ruffles, it turns into form. The wish to touch that form is fascinating.

Do not rush before your time; it is always ahead of you.

Imaginary woman (bronze, 50x52 cm)

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TIME STATION Everything can fit in a point: space, silence, light, time. Birth, time, death. But the point is time, which means it can live anywhere and everywhere. To be still, but also to be an elypsis on the path of a star, a constellation, the cosmos, the Universeâ€Ś As long as all is in it, it can become nothing. It can die. But, if a point can die, it also means it can be reborn, because it moves constantly. In its motion, it grows constantly, becoming the biggest, becoming the Universe. Therefore, it has to die again. In points. In a point. Multiplied into universes. Universes grown into a Universe. Universe born in a point. Point transformed into the soul of time, so it can live in it. And because of that it wants to freeze in time, endlessly turningâ€Śaround its imaginary axis.

Time Station (bronze, 410x150 cm)

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The winner (bronze)

Dogon woman (bronze) 200

Figure (bronze)

Portret (bronze)

Dogonâ€™s message (bronze)

Romena (bronze) 201

Drawings

I like the drawing because it is a line, whether a continuous or a dashed one, the same as life.

Cut the abbreviation short.

Life is like a flat tire, if you drive on it fast it has a short life.

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Repeat yourself if you are different.

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Kiro Urdinâ€™s Photography

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The Lucy specimen is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago.

Lucyâ€™s skeleton

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OMO VALLEY

It is the source of life for everything around it. I pass to the other river bank in a carved out dry tree trunk resembling a sailing vessel with a memow should I begin the text? n the words of painting – with paint. Why is Africa ber of the indigenous tribe Hamer. Suddenly, he takes a small corroded bowl and dips water from called the black continent? I don’t know...and the river. His face reflects pride, as if he wants to there are other areas located on the Equator. say that the entire river is like a pure source. In But... it is called like that everywhere...My last Africa the sun is plentiful and water is the mine of trip to Africa took place recently. In the plane bound for Ethiopia grave thoughts came over me; life. It is the privilege and magic prayed for by the holy spirits of the indigenous groups living here. isn’t the world entering a critical phase? EveryThat is reality and everyone respects water. After thing is on the rise: crime, population, disasters, differences between the rich and the poor, the use all, wasn’t life born in water? I pass the river in of silicone breast implants, false smiles, poisonous the dry carved out tree trunk, the river runs lazily, one would say that it moves within waters in which we bathe, or we drink, the proitself. On both banks the yellow-grey sand cover duction of medicines... Planet Earth gave birth to has hardened from the droughts. The trees are low man, and he does everything to destroy it. and wildly outspread and only a single thicker There are no brakes in his hands anymore. Only money and money... And where is he? Where will trunk, immediately next to the shore, invades the space. It is dead and no birds stand on it... there future generations be? are thousands of them around...but they are not More and more robot is entering his soul. But the like those of Hitchcock. Many coloured and joysoul is no chemistry to be understood. It is a ous, they seem to move the blue sky over the magcloud which is all over. Inside and outside. Nowadays, things happen this way. Tomorrow is nificent landscape. Here secrets are mixed with everything. And when night falls, the sky turns to already today, and today may be forever. a huge lighted disk dotted with stars... but as soon But let me begin with the main topic... I drink my first coffee in the small town of Jimka, as they go out, darkness swallows everything, like a black sticky ink. in the area called Omo Valley. About ten years A black illusion of everyday reality... ago, at an airport in Costa Rica, coffee experts My guide and I have just entered the small hotel in explained to me that the best coffee was being the Turmi settlement. It is a one storey hotel. grown in Ethiopia. Another connoisseur of the In the middle of the yard there is something same product, in the Paris Latin quarter, told me resembling an improvised balcony, a young girl is that the most expensive coffee comes from the Blue Mountain in the Caribbean island of Jamaica. serving coffee, tea,or something to eat. The walls of the rooms are painted in bright green and yellow. A third professor, an ethnologist from London, In any other place they would have been kitsch, claims that the people on that island originate but here they are a harmonious part of the space. from slaves brought from the same country in A hotel room costs twenty dollars. It has a bed which I now drink my coffee, and I, even withand nothing else. The water in the sink stingily out wanting, called to mind Usain Bolt. And I flows for a short period of time, but it doesn’t have say to myself – everything seems to be coming to be like this always. There is drought all around, from there. But let us also mention the first Lady or something resembling it. And the herbs, the Lucy. The parts of her skeleton that have been uncovered have already become an archeological shrubs, the low trees have adapted to survive in part of that space. I say to myself, in which code legend. As we all know, she also comes from the of life does the secret of this all lie? same soil. But let me get back to the Omo ValIt’s evening time. I sit on the threshold when a ley area. The word wonderful is not enough to describe it. There are two national parks. The first small frog jumps in front of me. From experience I know that in Europe they live in damp places one is Mago and the other one carries the name or where there is water, but here frogs live in of the area which we are discussing, Omo Valdrought. Strange frogs... or I might be ignorant. ley. Mago can be said to have been created for I order an omelette and the second course on the adventurists and the second one to have been the everyday menu, which is pasta with finely intended for the masochists. In the middle of the chopped cattle meat. above mentioned area the river Omo runs as a Ah, what an omelette. lazy, wriggling python..

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Here domestic animals are wild. They live freely in the surroundings that are still as they always used to be. The following three days that I spent in the hotel I ate only omelette, paired, of course, with several coffees. People here are black, but only until they smile. Then their teeth shine with whiteness, even more beautiful than that of ivory. Here a white person would seriously think about whether to smile. And we shouldn’t even mention the direct look and its sincerity. These people are neither naïve, nor ignorant. They have the power to understand something before it happens. Therefore, for thousands of years they have survived hunger, drought, floods... There are many laws in life that people in industrial surroundings cannot understand. Even if they do understand them, they will not understand the reason why they are such. The modern man has simply detached himself, as the bark does from its trunk and does no longer resemble his own self. But birds alight on the trunk and the branches, not the bark. In short, everyone that has come here becomes a part of the landscape. He adopts the pigments of this world’s spirit which does not ponder why things are as they are. There is simply no need to do so. Here there are no parking lots, no taxis, no traffic tickets, no noise. Life extends between the sun, the space and the clean air. But it is no longer like that! A few kilometers further, huge bulldozers butcher the wild space. A new road is being built. Africa is adjusting itself to being even more strongly colonized. Economically. The great forces need ores and raw materials; they keep their own reserves jealously. It is said that their main interests are the diamonds, naturally as a counter-favour. But who needs those? The truth is completely different, and the still unstable government institutions have difficulty coping with this phenomenon. Modern life begins to tighten its grip on the continent which is the birthplace of the Homo sapiens and wipes out the treasury of its genetic tree and without it the world will no longer resemble itself. It becomes a global victim of information. They’ll go forward, but they will be left without themselves! And without authenticity the world will no longer be the same. Yet, we have to admit that these people also have the right to water, electricity, medicine, education... And this is reality. Then, where is the middle? Nowhere! It moves and shifts. Just like life. There is no going back. Yet, behind all this there is nostalgia. Here one can still find the members of the “tribes”: 216

Mursi, Bodi, Kwego, Muguri, Ari, Banna, Hamar, Arbore, Karo, Surma, Dime, Konso... they persevere, they live. To see and experience these wonderful members of these ethnic groups is a genuine warm shock for every heart. Some of them have their skin engraved, others have it painted and the rich variety of additional decorations helps to enrich their beauty even more. Naturally spontaneous people, as if their heart is expressed through their smiles and with a direct look, which today is increasingly rare to find, they have nothing to tell. They are what they are, here on their own territory, on the dried off land inhabited by the ghosts of their ancestors. The discovered skeletons bear witness to a period of two or three million years or more of life on this continent. The Homo sapiens originated here, just like the above mentioned Lady Lucy. It is from here that modern man took off into his progress, and he returns with machines to destroy the archeology and the archeological testament of his own soul, forever burying his own genetic tree... Here I remember a certain thought saying: “The more I get to know people, the more I love animals” and I begin to wonder whether he was thinking of contemporary people. But this is in the nature on man. To create and to destroy. Therefore, sometimes history goes forward and sometimes it goes back. Actually, death here has another dimension. These simple people, with an authentic culture, are on the verge of final extinction. Firstly, due to the inevitable conflicts between them and secondly, much more terrifying, due to the power of capital and financial centers that direct things from the outside and transfer evil to their own ground. Unfortunately, they are not that numerous, the number itself marginalizes them. And let us not even begin to talk about the political means which they have at hand. If I continue writing on the topic, a much, much longer text would be needed. Therefore, I will make things shorter. I’ll try to say some information through photographs. Despite the physical difference and even the linguistic one, they have something in common. The belief. Their religion can be said to be pagan, but they believe in the force of the cosmos. Everywhere around them and above them are the holy spirits of their ancestors that can transform into stars, rain, wind, drought... They follow and protect them, but they can also punish them.

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K.U. Literature VAGINAS Vaginas, vaginas... eternal sovereign rulers of all our Suns and Venuses, gardens of wantonness, queens of passion... Blind theatres dance in your light! Vaginas, vaginas... Caravans of Moons and tender flowers rivers of life, volcanoes and lava. Lightning flashes multiply in the lowering thunder, earthquakes kindle in the pain of passion... Listen to the drumbeat of the heart that cries out, everything is blinded by your light, everything melts in the pearls of your smile. You have woken spring betimes with the music of your passion and drunken monsoons secretly tremble in a trance... Vaginas, vaginas, blossoming beauties... Before you cruise the pale fingers of the pianist and the smoke that dies down in the face of the candle of the night, his fingers with miraculous secrets entice your body, thirsty for love and longing to touch it. Seaweed blossoms from your love, the sea blooms and the fish. But the light here does not flicker, does not know the fish, does not touch the flowers and the waters of the sea. Let the sea remain a secret to itself, everything seeks to be gentle, to be close to your grace. Finally the moment of the speech of our soul arrives. Tell us, tell, the truth is here: with what harp do the strings of your passion awake. We, titans of space, fall like tiny snowflakes on your breasts, your bodies arrange a secret feast for us, no one will know, see in silver baskets we send you flowers, carnations, roses, orchids. Along the mighty waters of the Ganges and Bramaputra, hasten, the Tower is being built, Babylon invites you to love eight times on all of its eight levels, the Tigris calls you, the Euphrates calls you, Luxor calls you, the sphinxes call you. Tomorrow the pyramids will be decked with the tombs of all the pharaohs. Amon Ra will come with the sun inside him wanting to meet you, wanting to touch you in the darkness of the pyramids, in the caves of passion.

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LIGHT Viewers, listeners and readers, you are present on the day of wisdom, before you Plato is seated on the throne of the State, Shakespeare rhymes with Hamlet on the wall, Goethe christens his devil Mephistopheles, Sophocles weeps at Antigone’s birth, Pushkin challenges the Captain’s second daughter to a duel, Mozart using a lexicon studies the word note, Camus encounters the Outsider in himself... Viewers, listeners and readers, around all these acquaintances of ours, immortal mortals and mortal immortals who live and die by their own and others’ wills please resurrect the applause of the public in front of all the microphones and fraudulent charts... Viewers, listeners and readers, literate and illiterate alike, teachers, professors, deans, secret agents, spies and generals you are the living participants in the greatest sensation, you can see for yourselves that everywhere the halls are packed in cities, on mountains, on oceans, and the cosmos has hired out its auditoriums the halls of speech, of laughter and of ridicule, all the halls on the sun are packed, and all the halls in every constellation too, every star has sent its representatives, chroniclers, reporters, correspondents, every black hole has sent its representatives only the meteors will be in the role of observers. We are all waiting, they are all waiting while the temperature rises, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, we all want, we all desire wisdom’s representatives to say something ... Plato has split into three parts, Shakespeare has become a brick in Hamlet’s wall, Mephistopheles devilishly exiles Goethe to hell, Pushkin is mortally wounded in order to win the heart of the captain’s third daughter, Antigone is transformed into the board of a stage at Sophocles’ tomb, Mozart’s dead body has been thrown like musical dust into an unknown grave, Camus did not know whether it was worse to be a Plague or an Outsider... But the representatives of all the planets, stars, meteors and comets, black holes and atoms were impatiently awaiting the word of wisdom: they were born, they lived and multiplied without knowing what death is, so much did they want wisdom to speak out, but wisdom lived out its own life easily, joyfully and thoughtfully, it was a light that was travelling timelessly into eternity. 237

STAIN Do we know how long we had to travel to reach the chill of the wall, or have we forgotten to recall that our last farewell splashed like a bloody stain on the crumbling wall. Then the morello cherries bloomed and the demons danced their wondrous wedding dance. How many insects wafted then from flower to flower while our eyes blindly grasped the crevices in the dark, the cracks in our love that did not know how to speak that tender word. How our hearts were deafened by the density of the dark. A shadow was born on the sun, dark reigned on the moon, the stars guttered out in the silence of black graves. From that chill our hearts were left without streets or a window, while the healing herbs were dying in that gruesome sleep of the night. The troubled soulâ€™s breath halted, the threshold of the sandstorms vanished, heavy leaden rivers began to flow in the deserts, lost shadows of dried-up trunks and woods intertwined, petrified trunks, roots and holes came alive, the balsam in those cells awakened in the fossils of the insects. Our eyes alone knew how to recognise the dried flower in the crevices in the wall. The cracks in the love that no longer understood its own speech. How did we manage to gather so much darkness into one place. Everything was heavy, everything shattered into metallic drops and in each drop wailed the sorrow of our stain. The seas vanished into a bottomless, waterless vapour sticky tendrils strangled the breath of the new-born flower. The oceans were heavy with a liquid pain and our bones broke askew in the frost of that despair. What was that gruesome beast constricting us within that knew the secrets of the wall that sentenced us and broke the thread of the whispers of our hearts? Did we not then pledge ourselves to the wind of God in the mountains of the night while behind windows of juniper a spring dew fell, soft snowflakes of stars clung to the curtains of our love and neither of us discovered how to utter that word of our hearts. So nothing was deceit between me and you, so nothing was a stain between me and you.

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RATS This is the platform of the great rats, everlasting lords born into death, underneath trains and metallic screech of rails. This is the platform of sorrow and love, of the great rats of the evil empire, of corridors that travel in trains of fog of the birds that fly one way along the corridors of fog, scattering the spirit of the wind. Birds, corridors and passages of fog. The lens of the eye peers anxiously here among the rats, the trains, the rails. The fog announces to us and to you: No escape. It is lord and master of our entrails. It is the shadow of our route. Look, there are the poets who are just crossing the threshold of the entrance. They want to be first to bid us welcome, last to say farewell. The rails rattle askew at the tread, the tread of trains arriving and departing within us. The new arrives, the old departs. Here is the ball of love rebounding off the walls of life that no one can catch, can touch. Here everything is secret and concealed, the platform of the great rats - a great secret. How many platforms and trains to their souls, how many platforms and trains to our death ask the shadows of the guards of the death that is born in them, ask the guards of all the secrets stifled there.

MY LORD O Blacks, slaves of the blues how soft and white the fields from the cotton in bloom. Smoking nights in the breathing light black music summon you! Slaves of the cotton leaves, your soul is free and fair: It is the soul of the Lord that breathes in the soul of your music.

BODY O, my friend, I havenâ€™t the strength to say good bye. Do you see the shadow of the woman in the night and the trance of the dance of her body? This evening the night is drunk with the dark, this evening the night is maddened by that body, by that bodyâ€™s eyes that melt the night.

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THE BULL August burned bright in the yellow of the sand while the music gathered the hearts of all eyes. Trumpeters, trumpeters, the arena entreats you for quiet and for peace; The bull makes ready to dash out to his death and kiss the toreador who looks towards you, now before the fight begins, before the blade of silver flashes, look at the dusty whirlwinds that blaze in the eyes of the bull, How utterly beautiful he is, how black and how strong. His might moves in clouds of black shadows and ripples over the arena like a serpent’s tail. Here, left of the gateway, his hooves dig golden holes in the sand, his heart shatters into shards of ice at the sound of the trumpets that waken death. Should he weep or meet death proudly? In his soul he knows he is closed in and alone, only the dust beneath his feet moves as it chooses. A powerful light flashes for an instant in his sad eyes, he forgets the flaming red and his own blood, feels blinded and drunk on his childhood, remembers his mother. Oh fields, oh fields, how green you were, how fair: butterflies everywhere, mounds of soft earth all round. Oh fields of warmth and tenderness that charmed me! He recalls how he ran for the very first time, and everyone saw how light and fleet he flew. His mother wept with joy at her son how fiery and fine he was. Ah, grass and butterflies, mounds of soft earth, bubbles of spring! This ominous music drives death to run at me. Look how the toreador lures me with his hidden sword, look at the shadows of death that gaze into your eyes, music, you’ve wailed long enough in my soul, you were born to life as I was. If only I could have said farewell to my mother, have taken leave of her yesterday. I know the fields would have wept at our meeting. It’s the grape-harvest now and the wine’s being pressed. Music, do you have a mother, or is death your dam? If that’s the way it is I too will kiss her. But wait, something grips at my heart, my mother has something to tell me before she dies. She dies tomorrow, I today - without knowing her secret.

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NUMBER After my death I’ll tell you how many decades I’m behind in writing telephone numbers in my notebook; it is grubby, long-suffering and old. I write and write in it, rubbing nothing out. My telephone notebook is a city of the living and the dead, the dead are born again and the same is true of the living. It is a city of friends, loved ones and chance encounters. Meetings there take place at any time of day. Everyone starts out there with everyone and everyone knows everybody else. New friendships are old, the old are new. There everyone writes himself in without rubbing anyone out. Noted like this the numbers are stamped on the skin of the day and together they write secrets they don’t even know. Since sincerity settles into them all they merge and crowd together, stretched out they set inner roads in motion. So number matches number and is fond of it, so number hushes number and comforts it, though when there’s no third number any more there’s no response from the number sought. So the numbers entered will always be alive in themselves, and the fates of the secrets will last together in the travellers through the gentleness in their pure souls, and it will always remain so as long as the numbers stay in it, and as long as they can be told: Always be good to your souls and as long as my body moves I will be a river that flows in you all. But when it is not so I too will become one of the numbers there.

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Aphorisms

• Success on success – blindness. • The circle you belong to is the coop you’ll end up in. • Understand the solitude of those who live within you and you’ll be a human being.

• History repeats itself, its authors the victors. • Work like a slave, think like a thinker – even if you’re a slave.

• I can’t be touched – least of all by those who can’t hurt me.

• Nothing at once, everything in the meantime.

• There’s nowhere we can reach as long as we all want to be in the same place.

• Change your tense. Use the future if things don’t go right in the present.

• Feel good in your own skin, under it the years decide.

• You’re the same as your neighbour, but the converse could also be said.

• Don’t be forever shooting at me, some of your bullets are blanks.

• Humanise the success that means everything in life.

• Everyone dreams their own life’s dream, reality is life beyond the grave.

• To read that you know better than I do, I’d have to be literate.

• Tread somewhere else, the truth lies beneath your feet.

• Advert: Wanted – a parasite that gives blood willingly.

• Step by step, foot by foot.

• We’ll be equal before the law when the judges are too.

• Depending on myself, I depend on others. • Men went to Mars. The Martians said, ‘What robots!’

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• Men live penned in prison, animals at liberty in zoos.

• One page of love, several novels of life. • We’ll become what we are.

• Destiny decides on friendship, man on enmity.

• You can tell the day by its morning, but the year by its last day.

• The ultimate end of the end is to reach itself.

• As a footballer I was a national hero, but there were eleven of us.

• Africa is black, Europe is white unless it sunbathes.

• I thought I’d stop the clock this year but it’s already 31st December.

• Don’t root for me too loud, they’ll think I paid you more than the others.

• Friends are like teeth, they fall out one by one.

• Be patient, nobody’s waiting for you.

• The world has always been deceitful, but it has more accomplices now.

• I’m looking for a woman I can read at once while she translates me lifelong. • You want to meet the author? Read his text, he’s in it. • Man wants to become immortal, surely that means the death of the planet?

• Even under a king’s crown it’s a man who makes the decisions. • Equality between men and women is merely biological, in life she is everywhere.

• Either you run with the times or they trample on you.

• Power today is won by a majority of votes – and the number of promises that won’t be kept.

• Since we understood each other at once, we have less and less to say to one another.

• Between life’s first minute and its last – time flies.

• If only life were a bible, containing nothing but truth. • An absolute rule – no one is an exception. • Times past were better – so were we. • A recipe for a long life: live less each day. • Interest is like a pipe of peace; it must be shared for peace to rule. • You say it’s all one to you; have you thought that ‘all’ is plural? • The fool who keeps company with the wise is not such a fool after all – nor is the wise man who keeps company with fools very wise. • Take your time over the first step, the second follows by inertia.

• The earth’s in a tight place – everything’s on the increase. • Now is better than next time. • A stranger at home, a stranger abroad – a citizen of the world. • Wine can’t breathe because of the cork, but without it, it goes sour. • First kitsch, then avantgarde. • It’s no laughing matter being the tree of life in a forest fire. • Write a word every day, in the end you’ll have a novel. • Carnivores are bad because they eat meat, herbivores good because they graze on flowers. • If you don’t go on you’ll get to where you left off. 243

• What kind of laughter is a sneer? • The gift of genius is public comedy, it raises a laugh. • I’m looking for a way to tell you everything to your face – have you time to listen to any of that?

• Women and luck are alike, both changeable by nature. • Until you begin to apologise, you’ve done nothing wrong.

• Let’s chain Prometheus, the forest has begun to blaze around him.

• The universe is endless, time without a beginning.

• All present applauded the speaker, even the author of his speech.

• Stay in one place – you have to die somewhere.

• The meeting of evil spirits is postponed – they can’t bear standing on a sound platform.

• I’ll spend my time with you if you’ll leave me alone.

• Art has become universal – what someone can do, anybody can. • Shorten the next journey to the next step. • Look at success after an interval of time – isn’t there something grotesque in it? • I write freely, expecting the verdict to be liberating. • If you don’t live among friends, you too will become an enemy. • Politicians today have nothing to be pardoned for; they’re not guilty of anything.

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• The equator is at your feet, with your next step you’ll be North or South.

• Think differently about the same thing. • You’re living dangerously – one day you’ll hit the headlines. • My friends know me better because they look me in the eye more often. • What sort of friendship should we opt for: a day’s, a year’s or a lifetime’s? • A foolish thought in a play on words isn’t so any more. • Tomorrow is the day of our first encounter, today of our last farewell.

• A little every day and already a lot more.

• I follow in your footsteps but your feet leave no prints.

• People are blind in two situations – when they love and when they hate.

• The world has changed, everyone has begun to look like everyone else.

• Because we all give, everyone gets something.

• From where on the globe should I set out to reach my goal?

• Leap over what doesn’t deserve to be walked over.

• Better to conquer yourself than have others defeat you.

• The Achilles’ heel of the footstep is its print.

• Since we understood each other at once we have neither a past nor a future.

• Be extreme, the average is middling.

• A new sort of racism – party colours.

• Seeing birds fly freely, the emigrant would like to be a migrant.

• Who loves, overdoes things; who overdoes things is not loved.

• No one is last as long as love at first sight exists. • As long as you’re pacific, you’re the greatest ocean. • Of nine chances, we’re the tenth.

• Punishment is most often revenge, but when punishment errs it dreams of pardon. • I’ve a feeling I’ve seen you somewhere! Yes, don’t you have a feeling you need me for something?

• Ruler, is the middle class content? The upper class will never be.

• I stand the way my affairs stand.

• Man’s ecological error – overpopulation.

• Everything depends on the election, who will pay for it?

• Three kinds of slave: the slave to power, the wage slave and the credit slave. • Distance yourself from yourself, you’re close to evil. • Sure of yourself, sovereign everywhere.

• The younger generation likes autumn, it sees the older as a deciduous forest. • Don’t miss the moment if your future’s in it.

• I stand the way my affairs stand.

• Of all consequences, the first is the longest.

• The world’s become tragicomic, nobody laughs outright without a tragedy.

• The actress understood too late, to be a fashionable success she should be naked.

• You’re my first love; at the start I was the last to be first.

• Spring’s arrived, the flowers are in bloom, but no one’s taken a sniff at me.

• After the first comes the average.

• Of all womankind, the motherland weeps most honestly.

• As long as there was capitalism and communism there was the cold war; now the world’s in flames. • Better days are coming, so man will be even worse. • The nation and nationalities will be richer, everyone working on his own account. • The tax we pay from birth is life, the interest our years. • I’ve learned nothing from myself, all my life I’ve learned from life. • Talk openly but in an open space – words eco. • The difference between profit and profiteers: profit is divided, profiteers multiply.

• Brief announcement: full stop. • I say the same thing all the time, in this I differ from others. • Be in touch with your soul, the body’s fickle. • Judging from my instinct, they’re right to call me an animal. • Macedonia is immortal: it’s surrounded by deathless foes. • I’m always the first to do wrong, that’s why I’m so experienced. • Either be it, or stop going on about what you want to be. • Why shouldn’t I gossip about my friends? My enemies know in advance what I’ll say about them. 245

• He who is born with everything he needs has no need of himself.

• The bad novel became a drama, all the characters started to ham it up.

• Whoever wants to rule should be a realist, the female sphere is not amenable to that.

• Be civilised, abstain.

• I’ve no need of a visa, my friendship has no frontiers.

• After the good times comes reality.

• Think freely about freedom of thought.

• When a rich man swims in a sea of cash, he thinks it’s an ocean.

• The glass in your hand is fragile, the water in it heavy. • Why so many smiling politicians when they persuade us we’re living in difficult times? • I was sacked, I’d no electricity, my child had neither bread nor milk. The first snow fell! I went out for a walk boiling inside. • The wise man counsels the foolish as long as he doesn’t trust him – then he laughs at him. • As long as your chances are sinking, you swim well. • Between the frontier and the marriage bed there’s a foreigner. • According to the statistics, crime has decreased – but just wait till the next election. • Wise plus wise, wiser; foolish plus foolish, more foolish. • In childhood death is an illusion, in middle age a reality, and in old age an everyday occurrence. • The easiest woman is the inquisitive one, she’ll give herself to convince herself. • In life we either weep or laugh – the rest is the daily round. • When everything’s in motion, it’s hard to escape being trodden on. 246

• Where there’s punishment there’s fear, where there’s fear there’s deceit.

• The difference between the unfaithful man and the unfaithful woman - she has the greater choice. • If you’ve decided to go all the way, distance yourself. • Enough! - so that it doesn’t get boring. • When it’s certain the force that’s heading for you will win, face another way. • To live healthily, you should eat well - to live longer, eat less. • Judge the sublime, the rest is error-free. • Be in the middle; don’t underestimate the one below you, or overestimate the one above you. • If somebody serves you as a model, don’t undress in front of them. • Fill the mouth that constantly criticizes you, and the same mouth will shower you with praise. • Swim in the sea of love; later you’ll start to drown in it. • What would Tutankhamen’s attitude to silence be, when nowadays every ‘pharaoh’ has his own spokesman? • How to prevent the inevitable, when it’s a part of what’s to follow? • Line up in order, I want to set you right. • I’m in form, my wallet’s shaking.

• I am the avantgarde, I trample all before me. • The price goes up when we are paying, and falls when others do so for us. • Who’s more in the right: he who usurps another’s right, or he who wants to keep the right for himself? • Don’t limit the movement of those who follow you. • Write down what you said, but use fewer words. • Seize the moment when you’re in fashion, for fashion’s moment doesn’t last long. • Don’t irritate the mouth whose tongue expresses itself crudely. • Have we ever asked ourselves what happens behind the man who always wants to be in the foreground? • What do cows think of silicone breasts? • Finally the tastes of artists and consumers have coincided - paint and consume a Big Mac, Coca Cola or spaghetti. • I’m in a fix: should I take the queen, or checkmate the king? • Why shouldn’t I sell myself, if someone’s prepared to pay more than I’m worth? • There’s a philosopher with universal wisdom - he’s called Old Age. • No one is as young as his years, or as old as the years life has given him. • What is the evolution of the line of least resistance when the whistle blows for an outsider, and when it blows for the favourite? • We say that there’s nothing in space that means there’s no space.

• A king’s crowning success is his queen, the queen’s when both crowns are united on her head. • Today a person no longer knows whether the world has become civilised or militarised. • The end of all illusions - I’ve hit reality by mistake. • What should one’s attitude be when someone has done something for someone else and the benefit is mutual? • What would a novel look like with the first and the last pages blank? • Is there an ordinal number for the consequences of a wrong decision? • I’ve reached the peak of the pyramid, what’s the next point? • When you’re on the list of undesirables, the only consolation is that if they scored you out they might mark your name with a cross. • It’s a full moon tonight, should I think of sex or my wages? • Producers of the world, distribute yourselves! • Decide what your future route will be - the path you follow every day, or the road you should set out on? • Write down what you said, but use fewer words. • After Mt. Everest the next peak is Mars. • Does anyone know where the epicentre of a shaky marriage bed lies? • Money is a trial - spending deliveres the verdict. • Everything happens quickly - except in sex. • A kind od depresion - uncertainty. 247

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Kiro Urdin biography

1945 Born in Macedonia 1969 Obtained a degree from the Faculty of Law at the Belgrade University 1971-73 Worked as a journalist

1995 Represented France at the French Art Festival in Tapei 1996 Illustrated the cover of the book by Jacques Delors “Combats pour l’Europe”

1972 worked as a chiefset designer for the telecasts “You with us too” and “Contact”, dedicated to the music composed by Beethoven, Verdi, Mozart, Chopin and Monteverdi

1997 Illustrated the cover of the book by Anatoli Karpov “Mes plus belles victores”

1974 Studied at the “Academie des Arts Plastiques” in Paris

1995-97 Travelled around the world and realized Planetarium as a multimedia project which included paintings, films and photos

1977 Obtained a Degree in Film Directing from the ”Academy of Cinema” in Paris 1982-83 Painted the portraits of the participants in the renowned “Soirees Poetiques de Struga” series (Neruda, Montale, Orlov, Okai, Guivellic)

1997 Represented the Republic of Macedonia in Thessaloniki – Culture Capital of Europe ’97

1998-02 Wrote 8 books of poetry and aforisms in French and English 2003 Planetarium became a worldwide ballet performance created by the choreograher Debbie Wilson

1984 Worked as an independent painter in different countries : France, USA, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Mexico, Belgium, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Taiwan

2005 Became a member of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences

1984 Wrote and published the book “Le dedoublement de la personnalite”

2008 Represented Macedonia at the Festival de la Francophonie de Moscou in Russia.

1987 Listed in the reference work”Le Dessin, le Pastel et l’Aquarelle of the contemporary arts”, published by Editions Mayer

2009 Recieved and invitation by the City of Nuremberg, Germany, to exhibit at the National Gallery.

2007 Exhibited at the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Skopje and in Budapest

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K.U. Coworkers

Venko Serafimov

composer

David Hou

photographer

Debbie Wilson choreographer

Vasko Serafimov

composer

Petar Djurovski

editor

Dragi Tanevski cinematographer

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Ivan Mitevski director

Vladimir Petrovski - Karter cinematographer and editor

Pablo Ferro cinematographer

Paul Walleyn, assistant director

Kiro Urdin

screenplay and director

Anne Wouters

cinematographer

Marin Dimeski

photographer

Brand Ferro

cinematographer

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Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac Band)

Baroness DaniĂ¨le Bacardi and Donna Urdin

Arthur Densinger

Nelly Benmoha

Maui

Henry Kissinger and K.U., Acapulco

Gerard H. Meulensteen

Luciano Pavarotti, Mr. Pieter van Vollenhoven

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Jovan Pavlevski, K.U., Anatoli Karpov

A.Karpov, C.Timsit and K. U.

Baron and Baroness Enrico and Sandra Portanova, Acapulco

K.U., Andrea Griminelli

Gerard H. Meulensteen ( President of the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum ), Video presentation about Planetarium at Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Donna Urdin

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Cover designs by

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Kiro Urdin for ECONOMICA, Paris

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Kiro Urdin

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books

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SELF-PORTRAIT

My earliest knowledge begins with my greatgrandfather, Constantine. I don’t know what my great-grandmother’s name was. They came from Salonica and had fourteen children, twelve of whom died one after the other. The thirteenth was my grandfather, Vasil, and the fourteenth his sister, Tina. My father was called Michael and my mother Makedonka, as is my daughter. But to begin with myself. I am average in all things: of average height, of average weight, of average years and the colour of my hair is average. My mother and father were average too. And of course my three brothers and my sister are average. I wasn’t present at the moment of my birth. Time moved fast then. During the First World War my father was still a child, but even then he had made up his mind that I would be his youngest son. His wish was fulfilled towards the end of the Second World War. It was the month of May and three fortune-tellers told me that the flowers were still smelling of gunpowder. After that moment a good many

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years passed and peace reigned everywhere. Countries were transformed into flower gardens. There were no more wars, no more dead, wounded, starving... There was no injustice, evil or force. When I completed my studies everybody started to judge me. In order to improve my rating, I started with legal norms, and fell headlong into the loopholes in the law. There they convinced me that life beyond the grave can easily be buried. Because I had little patience for documents I began to paint them and then to record them on film. This same fact had undesirable consequences that started to multiply. Their number increased so rapidly that there wasn’t room for them all any more. The only way out was to surrender my space to them. The consequences demanded that I should understand their causes. So on average I became a point, so that nobody noticed me any more. Now my destiny depends upon the place where they insert me in their written texts. But if anyone asks me what my wish is, my response is this: because I am a point I don’t want to remain in any one place but to be in perpetual motion.

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Brothers Vasil, Kiro and Kostadin Urdin, Paris

K. U. and Guy Pas

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FILMOGRAPHY

1978 Pishta – Film 35 mm, 12 min, – OSMOSA Prod. 1994 I love you, Iban, – Film 16 mm, 25 min. – MKRTV Prod.

DOGONA

1998 L’art de Kiro Urdin – Film 16mm, 20 min, – MKRTV Prod.

2002 Film, 16 mm, col., 26 min., MKRTV Prod.Official selection – Festival de Lucerne

PLANETARIUM 1998 Planetarium – Film, 35 mm coul., 70 min. – MKRTV Production, 1998 Offiicial Selection – the38th Festival de TV de Monte Carlo. 1998 Film viewing at the Centre Georges Pompidou – Paris. 2002 Film viewing at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. 2003 Multimedia project, painting, photography, cinema, video, music, litterature and dance – OMO Dance Debbie Wilson Co., performance in Toronto, Heraclea, Ohrid, Skopje, Chicago, Geneva. 2005 Winner “Best Movie” – International Independent Film Festival of New York in Los Angeles. 2006 Film viewing at the Museum of Skopje. 264

2005 – Rose d’Or 2003 Presentation at UNESCO, Paris. 2006 Train Dog – Film video H.D., 36 min, Osmoza Prod.

WATER & FIRE 2008 Film video H.D., 59 min, Osmoza Prod. 2008 Grand Prix – International Film Festival of Sarajevo, Bosnia 2009 Winner “Best Director” and “Best Cinematography” – International Independent Film Festival of New York 2009 2009 Grand Prix, Europian Film Festival “Green Wall”, Bulgaria 2009 Grand Prix “ECO” – International TV Festival, Ohrid, R. Macedonia

PRESS

Paris Match Forum Artis, Modena Comercial Times Le Monde Jet Society International The Great News Le Figaro Kulturen Zivot Hsiung Shih Art Monthly Le Monde Diplomatique Honolulu Star Bulletin Mediterranee Magazine Herald Tribune Mainichi Shimbun New York Times Yomiuri Shimbun Aspen Daily News Asahi Shimbun Vernissage China post Dnevnik

Ehime Shimbun China news NIN Eindhovens Dagblad Independence Evening Post Aftenposten Taiwan Pravda Beaux Arts Magazine Toronto Star L’oeil Daily World Amateur d’art Libre Belgique Gazette de Genève L’Hebdo, Lausanne Gazette Drouot The San Juan Star Tribune des Arts El Nuevo Dia El Mundo

L’Echo Bruxelles Knack De Tijd Het Nieuwsblad The Globe and Mail Independent Film Quarterly Aspen News Rogalands Avis Art Press Tableau Politika Art Top Prive Halsingborg Arbetet Skånska Dagbladet Tribune des Arts De Krant van West The San Juan Star Aspen Star Le Soiar Le Dessin

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1986 Dubois, Jacques Kiro Urdin: Un message de fraternite, L’amateur d’ art, Paris, Sept. 1986, No.729, p.16 1987 Xuriguera, Gerard (Preface- catalogue) Kiro Urdin, Paris, Espace Delpha, 1987 Lalonde, Peggy, He has started a new dimension in watercolor, Daily Word, 21.01 1987 1988 Xuriguera, Gérard (Preface - catalogue), Kiro Urdin, Paris, E.F.F.A., 1988 1989 Importants tableaux abstraits et Contemporains, La Gazette, No. 20, 19.05 1989 D.D. Kiro Urdin un Réel Liquéfié, L’ Hebdo, Lausanne, 15. 06.1989,7975,p.14 J.-C.P. Kiro Urdin: L’aquarelle avec la force de l’huile, Gasette de Genève,Tribune des Arts, Geneve, 1989, No. 99,p. 17 Piguet, Philippe Kiro Urdin, Genève, L’oeil, Lausanne, 1989, No. 407, p.86 Geithus, Kjell Monmartre i Sandnes, Lokalt, 14. 09. 1989, p. 6 Reymond, Armande Matiéres Vivantes. Kiro Urdin à la Galerie Catherine Van Notten, à Genève Voir, Lausanne, 1989, No. 60, p.8-11 1990 Challenges New Expression – Exhibition by Kiro 266

Urdin, Ehime Shimbun, 6.01. 1990. Corinne Timsit International Galleries, Elephant Man (reproduction, p.68), El Nuevo Dia, 14. 09.1990 Allegre Barrios, Mano La sensibilidad institiva de Kiro Urdin, El Nuevo Dia, San Juan, 16. 10. 1990, p. 88 Marili de Laosa Explosion de arte en San Juan, El Mundo, 7. 09. 1989 Debrune, Johan Meesterlijke Urdin bij Robinsons Knoke, De Krant van West – Vlaanderen, Brugge, 31. 8. 1990, p. 22 Ferrier, Jean – Louis Art for the being ( In) Kiro Urdin ( catalogue), Paris, TMI – Connivence Editor, 1990 Rey, Stéphane Figuration libre et Contagion de L’informel, La Libre Belgique, Bruxelles, 5. 09. 1990, No. 248 ( Culture, No. 44, p.21) Rubin, Ada (Preface - Catalogue) Kiro Urdin, San Juan, Corrine Timsit International Galleries, 1990 El Mundo, San Juan Puerto Rico, 23 Septiembre 1990 Ernesto J. Ruiz de la Mata De la materia, El Mundo, Puerto Rico, 30 Septembre 1990, p.6,7 Samuel B. Cherson Interesantes muestras de pintores de tierras, El nuevo Dia, Puerto Rico, 2 Novembre 1990, p. 104,105 Teodosievski, Zlatko Slikite na Kiro Urdin (Kiro Urdin’s Paintings), Kulturen zivot, Skopje, 1990, No. 9-10, p. 31, 32 1991 Galerie Paris, Art Top, No. 121, February – March 1991, p. 22 Exhibition - Kiro Urdin, Ars Nova, Japan, No.4, April 1991, p. 25 Close up, Ars Nova, No. 6, 1991, p. 15 (cover reproduction).

De Cnodder, Remi La puissance eruptive de la forme et de la couleur (preface- catalogue) Kiro Urdin, Knokke – Zoute, Robinson Gallery, 1991 Miljoenen – dans rond Pavaraotti, Prive, 14 Sept. 1991 Jet Society International, Paris, No. 31, 1991 (cover page reproduction: “ The Elephant Man”, 1989) Mathieu, Denis F. Kiro Urdin. A la poursuite de l’essentiel, Jet Society International, Paris, 1991, No.31, p. 10-11 Toebosch, Win Kiro Urdin: Matiere, Mouvement, Emotion, Paris Match, Paris, 1.08. 1991, p. 92-95 Rey, Stéphane Amour des textes, des lignes et des coulleurs, Cortot, Cornelis, Urdin, Peire, naïfs, ensemble, L’Echo, Bruxelles, 24-26. 08. 1991 1992 Berg, Ulf Tecknare och temperament, Kultur, Galleri Flesser i Helsingborg, 20 January 1992, p. 28 Wagner, Stephan “ De hårda Åren Lärde mig ödmjukhen”, Helsingborgs Dagblag, 5.07. 1992, p.21 Xuriguera, Gérard Kiro Urdin: Un expressivite rebelle a dimension humaine, Paris Match, Paris, 20. 08. 1992, p. 10-13 Carlson, Larsolof Individuel frigörelse, Helsingborg, 10. 10. 1992 Jaustad, Hans Omsusat konstnärsöde, Kiro Urdin stäler ut på Gelleri Flesser I Halsingborg Arbetet, Malmo, 13. 10. 1992, p. 16 Kiro ar hett byte (cover page) Arbetet, Malmö, 13. 10. 1992 Toebosch, Wim (preface – catalogue) Kiro Urdin, Paris, Art Intenational Publishers, 1992 1993 Lång, Helmer Kiro Urdin och konsteins heliga eld, Skånska Dagbladet, Helsingborg, 27. 02. 1993, p. 4 Kiro Urdin, Dynamism, No.133 Japan, February – March 1993, p. 88,89. Tedeschi, Fabio The architecture of colour and form, Forum Artis, Modena, 1993, No. 4, p. 24 Toebosch, Wim Kiro Urdin, Forum Artis, Modena, 1993, No.4, p. 24 Daval, Diane Kiro Urdin. Reality liquefied, Forum Artis, Modena, 1993, No. 4, p. 25 Ortizar, Isaac Le voyage de Kiro Urdin, Forum Artis, Modena, 1993, No. 5, p. 12 Kiro Urdin, Europ’ Art 93, Art Gallery Robinsons, Forum Artis, Modena, May 1993 Bojgienman, Estelle Soho: Itineraire d’un artiste tourmente, “ France – Amerique”, Paris, 16 – 22. 10. 1993, p. 17 Kiro Urdin, Nicaf – Yokohama, Gallery, 1993 Rey, Stéphane Figuration en tous genres et maîtres du passé, Kobe, Urdin, Daufin, trois complices, Cristallo, Pruitt – Early Piero Della Francesca et Lesieur , L’Echo, Bruxelles, 21 – 23. 08. 1993, No. 163, p. 11

1994 Kiro Urdin – Artist, Dynamism No. 139, Japan, February – March 1994, p. 72,73 Kiro Urdin exhibe en Corinne, El Nuevo Dia, 21 01 1994,p.76 Old City gallery hosts Urdin viewing, The San Juan Star, 27. 01. 1994, p. F3 Alvarez Lezama, Manuel Urdin’s works - a dramatic diary of his feelings, The San Juan Star, San Juan, 30. 01. 1994 ( Venue, p. 7) Cvolon Camacho, Dorreen M. Provocativo Kiro Urdin, El Nuevo Dia, San Juan, 3. 02. 1994, p.96 Kiro Urdin. Una sintesis personal, El Nuevo Dia, San Juan, 6. 02. 1994, p. 12 - 15 Vaseva Dimeska, Viktorija, Shinich Segi Kiro Urdin ( preface - catalogue), Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, 1994 1995 Piguet, Philippe Kiro Urdin, L’oeil, 1995 Xuriguera, Gerard, Parmi Les Contemporains, Le dessin, p.50, 1995 Kiro Urdin’s Painting Show China News, 1 December 1995, p. 6 Nicaf – Jokohama, Gallery 3, 1995, p.57 The franch painter Kiro Urdin: Next time much more official in Taiwan, Comercial Times, 24 June 1995 Charity Exhibition, The Great News, Taywan,1995 Macedonian painter Kiro Urdin, China Post, 23 June 1995 Nancy, T. Lu Paris painter Kiro Urdin - paintings now on view, Life, 2 December 1995, p. 8 Press conference: Kiro Urdin, Independence Evening Post, Taiwan, 1995 1996 Kiro Urdin, Hsiung Shih Art Monthly No.299, 1996, p.64,65.; Art Exhibition by the World Famous Contemporary Painter Kiro Urdin, Taipei, p. 27 Vaseva Dimeska,Viktorija Descriptions of Kiro Urdin’s Influences, Delo, Skopje, 3. 05.1996 Petkovski, Boris Kiro Urdin (preface), Birth of a Painting in a Kiro Urdin’s studio, Paris 1996 1997 Boenders, Frans Around the world with Kiro Urdin (preface), Planetarium of Kiro Urdin, Neways Electronic International N.V., Amsterdam 1997 1998 Avec Kiro Urdin et Nall L’art est au Festival TV, Monte – Carlo, Mediterranee Magazine, 21 February – March 1998 Un “Planetariste” a Paris, Beaux Arts, N. 66, March 1998 Kiro Urdin – Planetarium , Gallerie Frank, Paris, 9 Fevrier – 27 Mars, Beaux Arts, Paris 1998 Rey, Stephane Kiro Urdin - Haute tension, Beaux Arts, 1998 267

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Design & Prepress Zoran A. Krcev

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Planetarism Movement by Kiro Urdin