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I would like to meet you in the street

a study of stars and people

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I would like to meet you in the street
On a quiet blue night
And say:
“Do you see these grand stars,
The bright stars of Hercules?
To them our Sun is headed,
And the Sun is followed by the Earth.
Who are we?
Mere wanderers, fellow travelers among the skies.
Why, then, is there on Earth
Quarrels and fighting, pain and bitterness,
When we all together are flying
Towards the stars?”​

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Maksim Bahdanovich
1915

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What stayed with me after my visit to the Tinn Museum is the story of Olav and Gunnhild Øverland, local people who
moved to Canada in 1923. Their descendant recently contacted the museum and donated the possessions the
couple took with them when moving to the other side of the globe. It’s what people chose to bring along, objects
with great emotional value, pieces of home.
That made me think about what I packed when I was moving to Norway from Belarus four years ago: family photos,
a toy, some art materials, several books I’d reread many times before, a very old sweater that had seen better days…
I also took with me memories, and my culture and history. Many objects and places in Norway remind me of home.
Thus, an encounter with the eight-point star, that is called a “rose” here, on a bunad in the museum instantly made
me think about Belarusian traditional embroidery.
I started reading about the symbol’s extensive use in many different cultures: from Sumer, Iran, Palestina, through
Ural, Belarus and Latvia, to Norway and the Mapuche people in the South America. An eight-point star sometimes
symbolizes celestial bodies, a mother, a child, a goddess, welfare… It is a simple pattern, and it may as well have
been invented several times in isolated cultures. When one works with textile, one realizes that the logic of pattern-
making is quite similar as the surface is made of interlacing threads that meet each other at a 90-degree angle.
Eventually, it’s a surface full of squares, whether one works with embroidery or weaving, and there’s a limited set of
choices for where the thread goes next.
However, I’d like to think that this pattern travelled. It crossed mountains, rivers and seas. Just like people. To me,
finding this symbol in Rjukan is evidence that we are closer to each other than may seem on the surface, we are
more alike than different, and appreciate beauty in foreign cultures so much so that we can adopt them as our own.
It’s a symbol of friendship and peaceful communication.
This meeting with the stars brought me also back to the poem I read a very long time ago. It was written by a famous
Belarusian author Maksim Bahdanovich. It was written in 1915, when the First World War had been going on for
about a year, and the situation in Belarus occupied by the Russian empire was turbulent. This poem resonates
strongly nowadays. But it also gives me hope.

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Yanina Zaichanka (b. 1995 in Minsk, Belarus) is a visual artist based in Norway, currently pursuing her Masters in
Fine Arts at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. In her practice, Zaichanka works with such topics as trauma and
healing, home and absence through an array of media that includes painting, textile, sculpture and performance.

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