According to ancient myth, before we are born, each soul chooses a path — an image, a shape, a purpose — and is assigned a silent companion to walk alongside us: a daimon. It remembers what we forget. It holds the map to what we once chose.
One day, in the quiet echo of the Camp Erech exhibition at MUDEC/BASE Milano, five people — two photographers, two dancers, one witness — surrendered to something they hadn’t planned. Call it accident. Call it timing. Or perhaps, six daimons meeting exactly where they were meant to be.
There were no rehearsals. No script. Just an open space, a saxophone, two cameras, two bodies in movement, and one attentive gaze. From this sudden alignment came a white moment: a space outside time, outside intention. It felt like the body already knew. The light already knew. The rhythm was already there.
An Improvisation, a Book, a Trace
Daimon, All of a Sudden is a book made from this fleeting moment. It was not designed, but revealed. The photographs by Giulia Zhang and Claudio Maria Lerario, taken during their Camp Erech project in the Adrar Desert, provided the visual ground. But something else took over: a kind of choreography of recognition. A movement not toward performance, but toward presence.
Claudio Gasparotto, dancer and founder of Movimento Centrale, and Silvia Ferraris, visiting from Burkina Faso, responded with their bodies. The space itself responded. A ritual unfolded—quiet, instinctive, and deeply familiar. A migration of images and gestures. A subtle pact between souls.
Only one person observed the entire sequence: Gloria Lisi, friend and witness. Her presence, too, became part of the invisible structure.
On Destiny, Love, and White Light
In Hebrew, destiny is Bashert. In Arabic, Maktub. In Greek, Daimon. Whatever the word, the essence is the same: something within us knows. Something follows us, waits for us, calls us — gently — until we’re ready to respond.
Daimon, All of a Sudden is not a documentation. It is a threshold. A fragment of collective intuition. A memory that belongs to all who have ever moved without knowing why—and then suddenly understood.
