Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things.
In the thick, humid undergrowth, where the foliage whispers ancient murmurs, a silhouette melts into the darkness. The earth is heavy beneath their steps, soaked with water and memory. Every snapped branch, every trembling shadow is an echo, a breath of an elusive presence.
Pia-Paulina Guilmoth searches for the space between worlds, that place where the body fades into the landscape, where edges blur until they become nothing more than refracted light on a canvas of mud and night. She extend a hand, a crushed fruit resting on the palm, and wait. Waiting is already a way of disappearing.
The deer approach slowly, their eyes gleaming like lost stars. They remain motionless, a fragment of the forest among the branches and wild grasses. It is a silent ritual, a fragile pact between the living and the invisible. During these nights of waiting, as the boundaries dissolve, something within them shifts gently.
In the harsh glare of the flash, the scene freezes. The shimmer on a butterfly’s wing, the shadow of a body lying in the mud, an arm reaching toward a sky that does not answer. There is fever in these images, urgency. A way of surrendering to the world while simultaneously retreating from it.
Because, at its core, this quest is a struggle: to exist fully in a hostile space, to find refuge in the folds of nature when the city shuts its doors, to become oneself in a world that still refuses to see.
Transition happens here, between the flicker of a fleeing doe and the burn of fire consuming an abandoned house. It is inscribed in the trembling of a spider’s thread suspended in the wind, in the mist that swallows the contours of bodies. It is a metamorphosis both intimate and wild, a secret passage between what was and what will be.
And in this in-between, Pia weaves her own territory—a place where rivers drink the flowers, where the night is filled with golden specters, where every image is both a prayer of love and an act of rebellion.
