On C Fodoreanu's “Ode to the Lake Sacalaia”
C Fodoreanu, lake and hills, c. 1990s, photograph
[Image description: In a grainy, double-exposed black and white photograph, a rowboat glides across the surface of a lake, the clouds above and hills beyond shivering in and out of the foreground.]
by Justin Duyao
“I am thinking about a wind
taking the place of my soul,
and my soul liberated
floating toward the cloud
to melt around the sun.”
—C Fodoreanu, “Queerly,” Ode to the Lake Sacalaia (1)
My dad has always been an early riser. When I visit home and happen to wake up early, I know I’m bound to find him seated in his chair by the fireplace—coffee in one hand, book in another. For several years when I was very young, I remember that he would spend his mornings in that chair, listening through the same Israel Kamakawiwo'ole record over and over. Eyes closed, mind 2,606 miles away. Facing Future (1993), it was called. Though he had usually gotten out of his chair and begun tinkering with something else, by the time the rest of us got out of bed, every word of every song is still burned into my mind, almost as if my unconscious mind had woken with him, all those years ago, and participated in the same morning ritual. Over and over and over.
The funny thing is, even though most of the lyrics are in Hawaiian, whenever a song from that record comes on today, I can recite every word. Of course, I don’t speak Hawaiian. (My dad doesn’t either.) And yet the words from those songs feel incredibly close to me. The shape of them, the weight of them, the impression is still there.
***
“We are the same,
me and you,
you and me,
same height,
same eyes,
same heart beat —
both on the same side,
almost alike, sky. Same love,
and pain, mostly unfulfilled,
mostly pain, drenched” (See 1).
***
Ode to the Lake Sacalaia, 2022
[Image description: In a double-exposed, black and white image, a shirtless boy with shaggy hair pulls on the oars of a wooden boat, the horizon behind him just out of view.]
When C Fodoreanu was a boy, he spent his summers roaming the mythical shores of Lake Sacalaia in Romania. Better known as “Pike’s Lake,” because of the large variety of fish—particularly Pike—that fill the lake, Lake Sacalaia is nestled in Bont Valley and collects the fresh water that flows from the Fizes River, which criss-crosses the flatlands of Cluj County. Surrounded by low, grassy hills and sprawling farmland, Lake Sacalaia is considered the deepest freshwater lake in Transylvania. Its precise depth, however, has never been confirmed, as the only divers who have ever attempted to reach the bottom dove 28 meters without ever finding it. All subsequent attempts to measure its exact depth have been thwarted, due to stories of divers who have tried again to reach the bottom but failed to ever resurface.
As a common resting place for migrant birds, the lake draws bird-watchers and fishermen alike, who converge from neighboring counties to enjoy the lake’s abundance of wildlife. The lake is also situated atop a massive vein of salt that runs from Dej to Turda and passes directly under the lake. Years ago, an old salt mine teetered on the lake’s edge, as did an ancient Roman road, along which miners used to pitch their settlements. Local legend also claims that a gate to a different world rests at the very bottom of the lake, one patrolled by strange beings that devour anyone who attempts to reach it (2).
Ode to the Lake Sacalaia, 2022
[Image description: An image of the cover of a cool blue book, titled Ode to the Lake Sacalaia. In the center, several layers of paper indicate the deepening topographical layers of the lake.]
What drew Fodoreanu to the misty edges of that lake, so many years ago, was not the promise of birds or fish or salt veins, but the possibility of spotting the rooftop of the sunken Roman basilica, which the lake is said to have swallowed hundreds of years ago. In his intimate and haunting collection of photos, poetry, and essays, Ode to the Lake Sacalaia (Cornel / Henry Art, 2022), Fodoreanu published for the first time a roll of film he shot as a boy at the lake more than three decades ago. Because the film sat undeveloped for so many years, most of the images are hazy approximations of faces, places, and shadows of memories: “fragmented and abstracted in the manner of memories, dreams or pieces of a softly humming puzzle … awash in urgent ambiguity,” as wrote L.A. Weekly art critic Shana Nys Dambrot (3). Altogether, the work captures the artist’s intense fascination with stories, legends, and place, long before he ever became an artist.
Ode to the Lake Sacalaia, 2022
[Image description: A photograph of the inside fold of a book, the pages of which are saturated in an eerie navy blue, depicts a figure hovering in dark water, their head just out of frame.]
Ode to the Lake Sacalaia is a portrait of the mind of a young boy, leaning over the edge of the boat, camera-lens fixed on its murky depths, waiting to see the tail of some monster slide by. In so many ways, the man who rediscovered these images years later—a man whose multi-media practice today still strives to understand the relationships between human and nature, past and present, memory and mythology—has not moved a muscle. C Fodoreanu is still braced against the edge of that boat, camera in hand, waiting.
***
“... and bear witness to the passing of time, the collective of structures, the silence of reflective light. … An amalgam of empty from long ago eras, in and around the Rome of ancestors, and bare people of anonymous image makers once freely moving about” (4).
***
There’s a very old photo of a very young me curled in a ball on a towel, sleeping, with my aunt and sister hovering over me. Though we were dressed for beach going, it appears we’d ducked into the shade of a kiawe tree, I assume in the heat of the day. It was 1998, and that photo must have been taken just after (or before?) my second birthday.
I believe that was my first time in Hawai’i. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve been back to the islands maybe five or six times. I definitely don’t remember that first trip—or that moment in the photograph—at all; but my family always tells me stories about it. I learned recently that we stayed for a whole month, that my dad had come up for something like two weeks, but my mom, sister, and I spent the entire month there. (By “there,” here, I mean that exact beach.) Whenever we’re all together, the photo album from that particular vacation makes an appearance at some point. The good old days, for my family, have a beginning and an end—a timestamp. In some ways, any measure of nostalgia in my relationship with my grandmother and aunts, whom I see very rarely, seems to be drawn from the well of that memory, as well.
This summer, we went back to Maui, where my parents lived when they first met and much of my family still lives. I’d been back once before, in between my second and twenty-sixth birthdays—though I don’t remember that trip much either—so I walked off the plane expecting to feel like I’d finally arrived home. I noticed myself searching the whole time for familiar landmarks, whiffs of things like places, sounds, smells, that felt like “mine.” In the end, I was surprised to feel very out of place.
Places change, yes. Just like people. But this place—Hawai’i—a place to which I credit exactly one half of my family’s heritage, felt completely unfamiliar to me. All of the sudden, it was as if this story I’d been told my whole life about who I was and where my family was from began to fall apart.
***
“The lake then does its trick:
grains and shines, splits and seeds,
whirs and beats; bits and shadows,
tears and scars, mine. You,
adding to my equation” (See 1).
***
jump #2, c. 1990s, photograph
[Image description: In a double-exposed image, one boy watches while another boy leaps from the edge of a small hill.]
Many of the stills in Fodoreanu’s photos are double exposed. jump #2 (1990s, printed 2021), for example, captures both the image of a child mid-air, as they leap between one edge of a ravine to another, and the outline of a child behind them, watching. The confusion of which image is in front of/behind the other is particularly fascinating. Was the child on the edge watching the other child jump? Or are they both the same child, one measuring the jump and the other executing it? Or one executing it and the other looking back, in awe, at their achievement?
lake and hills (1990s, printed 2021) creates a similar effect. Stark across the center of the photo is a darkened, jagged treeline, the surface of the lake glimmering flatly below it. Just behind that, a row boat oscillates in and out of view—oars poised, figures muddled. And just behind that, a tumultuous blanket of storm clouds, which sometimes bleed into the foreground but mostly sink into the back. To me, the distortion of the linearity of Fodoreanu’s archive feels right. It does not matter which came first and which came second. The significant thing is that the memory has come back to him at all. What was lost, for so long, has strangely returned to him, like a thought that flashes before your mind just before you wake up and dissipates, as soon as you open your eyes.
Ode to the Lake Sacalaia, 2022
[Image description: A photograph of the inside fold of a book: one one one page, a blonde head and a church steeple are contrasted against a gray sky; on another, a blurry view of a lake from the edge of a boat.]
The most confusing memories I hold, in my mind, are the ones that come from stories I’ve been told about myself as a child. They’re confusing because they aren’t necessarily my memories. I was there, yes, and I can even see it all, now. But none of these memories there are mine, not really. Even stranger are the memories that come back to us later on, the ones that bubble to the surface of our conscious minds when we least expect it.
My body seems to remember the last song on Kamakawiwo'ole’s record, for example—“Hawai’i ‘78”—not, per se, my conscious self, but every other foggy thing just below the surface of that self. Whenever it comes on, it’s my body that reminds me of the first words he sings: “Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i” (5). Not me. I wasn’t there for the listening, I was asleep. I only happen to be present, here, now, for the remembering.
***
For Fodoreanu’s book, critic Seph Rodney, wrote an essay titled “To be Rowing.” In it, he captured an important moment of exchange between Fodoreanu’s younger and older self.
“And there is a boy peering down into the depths. Does he see himself decades from now, rescued from regret and failed prospects, alive and well, breathing in time with the rhythm of water he has not forgotten?” (6). Later, he quotes a section from Anne Secton’s poem, “Rowing,” which captures the strange sensation of holding multiple selves within you at once.
“and now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I’d say,
I am rowing, I am rowing
though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls” (7).
Notes:
Fodoreanu, C. “Queerly.” Ode to the Lake Sacalaia. Cornel / Henry Art, 2023.
“Pike’s Lake (Lake Sacalaia).” Pensiunea Lacul Stiucu. Accessed July 21, 2923.
Dambrot, Shana Nys. “The Lake: Monsters and Metaphors.” Ode to the Lake Sacalaia. Cornel / Henry Art, 2023.
Fodoreanu, C. Poem composed for his 2020 exhibition of photo prints printed on rags, and bear.
Kamakawiwoʻole, Israel. “Hawai’i ‘78.” Facing Future. Mountain Apple, 1993.
Rodney, Seph. “To be Rowing.” Ode to the Lake Sacalaia. Cornel / Henry Art, 2023.
Sexton, Anne. “Rowing.” poeticous. Accessed July 21, 2023.