Susan Silas


	Tisza River Project (images) in progress at www.tiszariverproject.com More and more often we hear the claim that in the future wars will be fought, not over oil, but over water. While I think about this often, my decision to trace the course of the Tisza River, from its entry point into Hungary at Tiszabecs in the North, where one can easily swim the short distance to the Ukraine, to just south of Szeged where the river winds its way across the border into Serbia did not stem from a conceptual model. It came from a lingering response to an image in a film whose name I've long ago forgotten. It was a Hungarian film about first cousins who decide to marry despite the taboo against first cousin marriage. They are shunned from society and take up residence in a small, remote cabin along the Tisza. It was an image of the river in that film that created the longing to go there. In a book celebrating a millennium of life on the river a quotation from the Hungarian writer István Széchenyi describes the Tisza Valley as "the cradle of our race". There is a keen awareness of the water level on the Tisza. Daily, a report is generated and posted on the internet measuring the height of the river at short intervals, noting whether it is rising or falling. (download PDF of Daily River Report) Bridges spanning the river and stairways leading down to its banks bear yardsticks so that even the casual passerby can have a accurate measure of its status. There is an intimate and daily relationship between the river and those who live along its banks. At first I was thinking about the fate of water generally but my focus was altered by the discovery that the Tisza is home to the worlds largest mayflies. These mayflies live in the mud beneath the water for three years as larvae and emerge once a year in large swarms, having a life span of only three hours. The swarming on the river has a specific sound. Mayflies twirl and dance on the water surface. Clustered in large bunches they bring to mind giant flowers. This eruption of mayflies from the river bottom is called Tiszavirag in Hungarian -- virag for flower -- thus flowering of the river. This phenomenon has much in common with the themes that connect my work for the past decade: looking at decay and death and transformation -- at processes of change, both in the literal landscape, the landscape of memory and in the physical body. (images on this page from A Millennium on the Tisza, Damjanich Janos Muzeum, Szolnok)