A Diptych of Eidetic Imagery and an Acoustic Essay on Time: The Road to Damascus and The First Eastern Dream by Ivana Stefanović

The focus of this study is on two works by Ivana Stefanović (b. 1948) that are part of the same experiential whole: The Road to Damascus, a travel prose, written between 1995 and 1999 and published in 2003, and A Landscape for Tape: The First Eastern Dream, composed in 2006. During her four-year stay in Syria, Stefanović listened to and became acquainted with the world of the East, which she wished to perpetuate, remember, enhance in her memory, and record forever. These two creative works constitute testimonies of the composer’s life in Syria—complementary ‘documents’ of un-distilled, preserved reality and its ‘proven substrate’. These works of art attest to the coexistence of external noise and sound vibrations, restlessness, constant movement, physical decay, inner silence, peace, spiritual life, and eternal space. Also, they are the result of two kinds of acoustic resonances that permeate each other: the noise that inhabits monumental and archaeological sites, carrying the aura of their erstwhile worlds through the centuries, and the silence of individual receptive responses, either directly to the sound/sounding of those locations or to its potential artistic transpositions. The Road to Damascus and The First Eastern Dream are a type of diptych of space and time, of eidetic imagery inscribed in the archetypal layer of consciousness bordering the unconscious, and polyphonic essays on the utopian coexistence of different worlds, which could only be realized by a dreamer.