Exorcism Against the Well of Loneliness

Well! It was a painful moment,
but now I will try to live in the present.
I do not seek the past or the future.
and my life is a fragment of my own life,
rough in outline, simplified but certain:
the sun is cold, the slate is clean. ¹

                              Fernando Birri, January 5, 1979

A photograph from the archive, altered by Birri, shows a mountainous landscape covered in trees and vegetation over which he paints a multicolored mandala. In the contrast between vegetation and abstraction, color and grayscale, the image appears as the dawn of a new beginning.

This visual composition resonates with the emotional landscape traced in his writing. The poem reflects an intimate process of transformation—one shaped by the emotional and existential toll of ORG, his decade-long film project, and the crisis provoked by the possibility of it never being seen after the lead actor tried to prevent its release. This was more than a professional setback; it was a rupture that reached deep into Birri’s personal life.

In 1979, amid this crisis, Birri traveled to India and Nepal. Traces of this journey remain not only in his travel notebooks ² and the recollections of those closest to him, but also in the mandalas he created during this time. These images evoke meditation, healing and inner alignment, while also representing the structure of the world and the cosmos. In them, Birri seems to seek a form of balance—a visual exorcism against despair and a quiet gesture toward renewal.