Artist: DJ Furth
Edition: 1/1
Maxim is an Irkutsk native, filmmaker and explorer. His passion for Siberian spirituality, nature and adventure is strong.
This portrait was taken on the banks of Lake Baikal.
“Every season, every time of the year, Baikal is absolutely unique and unlike its other selves,” Max explained.
“There are probably no easily-accessible places at Baikal and its surroundings…You always need to crawl somewhere, wade somewhere and strive for something, therefore, the value of everything you see and the sensation from getting there is doubled, tripled. So, Siberia for me is…like a certain treasure which, as befits any treasure, is hard to reach.”
“For me, when you are in such a place where even your internal discourse stops. It’s an inner feeling that I should not be here, that this is not for people at all, it’s such an ancient and self-contained territory that my first reaction is kind of a slight embarrassment, or probably even shame that I ended up there, that I can see it and perceive all of it with my own eyes. This feeling is of course the sharpest and the most distinct when you are alone, when it’s quiet, when you understand that you don’t even know where the nearest people might be.”
In response to conceiving of the spiritual world, Maxim shared that, to him, “the difference between the material world and the spiritual world is like the difference between our senses of touch and smell…The sense of touch is based on the fact that we can touch objects, and we consider it to be a proper sensory organ…And we consider it to be something ‘real.’
“Intuition, however, we consider to be something fathomless. We imbue it with supernatural qualities. But I feel like intuition is exactly the same as the other senses, and how the sense of hearing, eyesight or the sense of smell can be well-developed in a person, in the same way the intuition of a person can be well- or not very well-developed. And from my point of view this is our connection with… like you say, the world of spirits, some immaterial world.”