Liliana Livneh has an unusual hobby — she collects heart-shaped stones. The Argentine artist has a basket full of such stones that she has been collecting over the years.
“Every time I go to the beach, I find a stone like a heart,” smiles the lady born in Buenos Aires, who resides in the land of her late husband — Israel.
In Calcutta as part of the contingent from Argentina, which was the year’s focus country at the just-concluded Book Fair, Livneh showed The Telegraph Salt Lake her social media display picture. It was a photo of her palm in which was resting a stone shaped like a heart. “I found it in Herzliya, a beach in Tel-Aviv on the Mediterranean Sea. Most of my collection is from there and Mar del Plata on the Atlantic Ocean in Argentina. Some are also from the beaches of the Aegean Sea in Greece.”
“I was born in the Atlantic and the mixture of love and destiny brought me to the Mediterranean. I carry with me the legend of both and share with Thales of Miletos (the Greek philosopher) the idea that everything is water…” she has written in an introduction to a bunch of picture cards that was printed on the occasion of the book fair.
Livneh has made a three-minute video film. “I gave it the caption El Mar hacedor y artista (The sea as creator and artist),” she said.
The thought is inspired by the film adaptation she had seen of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, where Siddhartha’s resolve to reach a goal is described as steadfast as a stone thrown in the water. “…it (the stone) hurries by the swiftest possible path to the bottom. It is like this when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolve. Siddhartha does nothing—he waits, he thinks, he fasts—but he passes through the things of this world like a stone through water…” goes the relevant passage in Hesse’s work.
In Livneh’s multimedia project, which she calls Book of Time, she took a photo of her collection of stones and projected it on the pages of an open book carrying pictures of the sky. On the other page of the open book is video footage of sea waves splashing.
“The soul learns best when the sky is its roof,” she said, quoting Rabindranath Tagore. “When I was 11 years old, my father gave me Tagore’s The Gardener. From that moment, I wanted to visit India. Today in his birthplace, my artist’s books quietly settle as a token of gratitude amidst this array of books and diverse languages,” she said, referring to the Book Fair.
Her artworks were put on display in the Argentina pavilion. “In this, I used the bark of a tree on a book. The material could be anything. What I care about is people, without prejudice. Art teaches us to be patient and to care,” said the artist who spent her first day in the city learning about block print.
“I went to this little place and enjoyed it so much. I like to read and travel. Any memory or feeling, for me, can become a work of art,” said the artist, who has worked with a variety of materials, ranging from wood to hand-made paper, video to glass and gave a presentation on her work inspired by Jorge Luis Borges and other Argentine authors at the book fair.
Asked what excited her the most on her Calcutta trip, she said it was the discovery of a “wonder on the street”. It turned out to be a Saraswati puja pandal on her way from Hyatt Regency to the book fair.