> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://abagofstories.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Dáimon, All of a Sudden - URL: https://abagofstories.com/daimon-all-of-a-sudden/ - Published: 2026-09-12T15:37:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-18T16:48:55.000Z - Description: Ten minutes of improvised dance at BASE Milano. A week later, the photographs opened a question about calling, freedom, and the lives we make together. - Author: Emmanuel Edson - Tags: The Ethics of Looking, Field Notes, Performing Arts, Italy The first thing the photographers did was run for their cameras. There were two of them, Giulia Zhang and Claudio Maria Lerario, and two identical Canon R6 cameras. They were at [**BASE Milano**](https://base.milano.it/?ref=abagofstories.com) for the [**Camp Erech exhibition**](https://abagofstories.com/an-exhibition-in-a-box-some-assembly-required/), which presented Ayzoh!’s community photography project in the Adrar desert of Mauritania, including their photographs. Both the project and the exhibition were also supported by AFAR. Something was happening in the adjacent room. They began to photograph it. This was April 2023\. Camp Erech was part of **Milan Design Week**. The choreographer and dancer Claudio Gasparotto, the dancer and art therapist Silvia Ferraris, and the saxophonist Vincenzo Marino had come to contribute a performance connected with the exhibition. **They had never met before**. In the adjacent room, another improvisation emerged. Nothing about this additional performance had been decided or imagined beforehand. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-002.jpg) ## It lasted ten minutes The photographs follow its sequence. In them, the room extends behind the dancers through repeated columns and windows. The floor bears marks. Pipes cross the ceiling. At the far end, objects remain stacked or set aside. Even when the figures seem suspended, these ordinary details hold them in a particular place. A week passed before the word *dáimon* entered their reading of the photographs. The idea had interested Ayzoh! for some time. They were drawn to its possible affinities with other ways of **thinking about destiny,** calling, and the meaning of a life. Yet no one had entered the room to illustrate it. Gasparotto had no assigned part as a guiding spirit. Ferraris had no predetermined journey to enact. The photographers were responding to an event whose meaning they had no time to formulate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-003.jpg) Looking afterward, they began to see Gasparotto as a possible embodiment of the dáimon: a presence urging Ferraris toward her destiny. The photographs gave an existing question a visible form. This became the interpretive starting point for the book ***Dáimon / All’improvviso***. The interval matters: ten minutes belong to the encounter. The following week belongs to the work of seeing it again. Between those two times, an action becomes an image, and an image becomes available to thought. There is room in that interval for a book. There is also room for uncertainty. What the photographers recognized afterward need never exhaust what the dancers were doing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-004.jpg) ## The room beside the exhibition One of the opening photographs contains no visible human figure. Windows and columns recede toward the back wall. The eye follows the long central surface of the floor. There is no need to imagine a sound, a temperature, or an expectant audience. The architecture supplies enough information: this is a large room, and a body inside it will have room to become small. As the sequence unfolds, the dancers occupy different measures of that space. A figure at a distance can almost disappear among its vertical lines. A nearer body interrupts them. A bent knee or an outstretched arm establishes a direction that the building does not provide. The photographs allow the room to remain visible. Its surfaces are neither polished away nor obscured by a setting invented for the dance. Window frames, doors, floor markings, and equipment continue to share the image with the performers. A gesture has happened here, among these things. The black-and-white sequence holds those surfaces together through differences of tone. Ferraris's dark clothing gives her figure a distinct edge against the room. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-005.jpg) In closer views, folds in fabric and the lines of a hand become part of the same visual field. The eye can move from the building's broad divisions to the small articulations of a body without entering a different palette. There is variety within that continuity. Some photographs spread the encounter across the full width of the room. Others let a figure occupy most of the frame. A distant person asks the reader to attend to scale; a close face asks for a different degree of care. The sequence moves between those demands. The windows do not function only as background. Their repetition helps distinguish one position from another, while their pale surfaces set off the darker figures. In several views, the architecture appears almost regular enough to measure. Against it, a lifted foot, a bowed back, or an arm reaching diagonally becomes especially legible. These are choices visible in the finished photographs. Their effect can be examined without assuming that either photographer had time to formulate it in words while working. The frames show the decisions; the later sequence allows their relationships to develop. In the neighboring space, *Camp Erech* was presenting photographs by Ayzoh! from the Adrar desert in Mauritania. In his contribution to the book, Gasparotto describes that work as telling the story of Yahya, **a seeker of meaning**. It was the exhibition that had brought these people together in Milan. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-006.jpg) That connection has a physical scale: the distance between adjacent rooms. It also has a human scale: an exhibition creates the occasion for another encounter. The new work begins inside the circumstances of the first, while taking a direction of its own. Yahya's story retains its own ground. The Milan performance does not give us an additional account of his life. It records the movement of people who were present at an exhibition about him. Keeping those stories distinct makes the connection more precise. We can follow the actual passage between them without asking a person in Mauritania to stand for the inner lives of artists in Italy. Within those circumstances, **the improvisation had no script**. This was the account the photographers later gave: there had been no time to think; they had simply gone for their cameras and started to work. Their urgency belongs to the making of the photographs. It does not explain every image. Once a photograph exists, the viewer can spend a long time with a fraction of a second. We can examine the distance between a hand and a shoulder, return to a face, or look past both dancers toward the windows. The time of looking expands around the time of exposure. **The room is useful here**. Its repeated forms help us register change. When the figures move closer, we still recognize the place around them. When they reach the floor, the same columns continue upward. The sequence has something against which to measure each alteration in posture and proximity. It also gives the dancers places to be separate. The relation between them includes the stretches of floor they have yet to cross. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-007.jpg) ## A white moment Silvia Ferraris gives the experience another measure. Her contribution to the book is called *Attimo bianco*. It is brief, made of passages between thought, space, and bodily attention. Its title can be translated as *A White Moment*. The word white belongs to her account. It gathers the space into a remembered experience, and the experience into language. The photographs have their own whites: walls, windows, light surfaces. Her writing brings something the images cannot supply by themselves: the participant's description of how the moment felt. The text is reproduced below in a complete English translation. > The passage took an instant, from the familiar course of the past few days, from the coming and going of visitors to Camp Erech, from the noise of thoughts—to the white of a new space. > > Free. Suspended. Floating. Everything so natural: the rhythm of movements, invisible traces, mysterious bonds within each of us. > > Dance welcomed the living part, free from the deceptions of our lives, and allowed it to unfold in a surge of gazes, tensions, trajectories. Dáimon? > > White that all of a sudden becomes gesture. Harmony, understanding, a subtle play of listening in every cell of the body. Bodies. Silence. Offering ourselves to one another. A reciprocal act of self-giving from the infinite past. Then we crossed the threshold of time, with different eyes. Full of white. > > **A White Moment — Silvia Ferraris** Her question survives the translation: *Dáimon?* It sits within the account without settling it. The question leaves the experience available to a word while preserving the possibility that the word will only partly reach it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-008.jpg) Ferraris remembers movement through gazes, tensions, and trajectories. Those are also relations the photographs make visible, although their inward significance remains hers to describe. **The phrase about offering oneself is reciprocal**. That is an essential part of her testimony. It gives us reason to look for an exchange in the images, to follow the changing positions of the two dancers rather than assign all initiative to one. In an early close view, Gasparotto extends a hand toward Ferraris. His face is visible; hers is seen from the side and behind. The hand occupies the interval between them. Its fingers do not close into a command we can translate. It is a gesture whose continuation has been withheld by the photograph. Elsewhere, Gasparotto is low to the ground and Ferraris stands before him. Both extend their hands. His palms turn upward. Her arms reach toward the space above them. The arrangement allows several readings, and its exact meaning remains unstated. Ferraris's words suggest how to remain with it: attend to what passes between the figures. Each brings a body with its own capacities and limits. Each changes what the other can do next. The shape belongs to their meeting. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-009.jpg) ## A name discovered afterward There is a temptation, once an interpretation has arrived, to send it backward through the story. A movement begins to look like preparation. An accident acquires the neatness of intention. The finished book seems to have been waiting in the room from the beginning. The account of these photographs resists that temptation because its makers have been explicit about the chronology. The dáimon was recognized a week later. It was a reading of the images. That makes the reading no less worth pursuing. Much of the work of memory happens after an event has become unavailable to direct experience. We return to what remains. **We connect it to other things we know**. Sometimes a small detail changes the way we remember the whole. Here the material was unusually rich. Two photographers had responded to the same improvisation. Their images could be placed in sequence. Positions that had vanished in movement could be considered beside later positions. A moment of support could be read alongside another in which its direction changed. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-010.jpg) **The photographs were signed together**, as Ayzoh!: Giulia Zhang and Claudio Maria Lerario. The shared credit is part of how the work is offered to the reader. It allows the sequence to be encountered as a common body of photographs, without dividing its successive views into rival claims of authorship. Two identical cameras did not occupy the same place. The resulting photographs carry differences of distance and angle. Some retain the full length of the room. Others bring a hand or a face near. The continuity is made through those differences, through the decision to let one image follow another. For Ayzoh!, the figure of **the dáimon emerged in that act of looking**. Gasparotto could be seen as the presence urging Ferraris toward a destiny. His extended hand, his proximity, and the lift acquired a possible symbolic relation. That relation remains an interpretation. Ferraris continues to be a dancer making movements with another dancer. Gasparotto continues to be a person whose body is sometimes extended, sometimes bent, sometimes supported. The symbolic reading lives alongside their physical specificity. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-011.jpg) This is where the book becomes interesting as documentary work. Its photographs document an improvised performance; its title records a subsequent encounter with those photographs. Both belong to its history. Readers can enter the thought without being asked to mistake it for the original plan. **A name can deepen attention**. It can also narrow it. Calling a figure the dáimon invites us to think about guidance, compulsion, and vocation. Continuing through the sequence asks us to keep revising what guidance might look like. The man who carries will later rest against the woman he carried. The photographs provide the question and the means of questioning it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-012.jpg) ## Between the human and the divine The word *dáimon* reaches this room through several histories. In Greek writing, its significance changes with the speaker and the work. A useful place to begin is a conversation about love. In Plato's *Symposium*, Socrates recounts the teaching of Diotima. She describes Eros as a dáimon occupying the interval between the mortal and the divine. Its activity is mediation: carrying between gods and human beings, making communication possible across their separation. The passage gives us a figure of relation and passage, one among multiple intermediate powers. [Plato, *Symposium*, 202d–203a](https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html?ref=abagofstories.com). This is the context in which the language of a messenger becomes useful. Taken on its own, however, “divine messenger” can make the word sound simpler than the histories through which it travels. In the book, Gasparotto uses that phrase as the entrance to his reflection on dance. His use belongs to his understanding of his practice. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-013.jpg) For a reader looking at the photographs, the idea of an interval has a particular force. A hand reaches into one. A body waits across another. The room contains distances that can be crossed and distances that a photograph keeps open. These visible intervals are physical. Their relation to Diotima's account is an analogy we make while looking. The analogy offers a way to think about mediation without claiming that the dancers have reenacted a passage from Plato. Consider the photograph in which the two faces are close and Gasparotto's hand is raised between them. There is enough detail to recognize a human encounter, and enough incompleteness **to prevent us from possessing it**. We see the gesture's form. We do not hear what may have preceded it or know what either dancer was thinking. An image communicates across that distance. It carries something of a meeting to people who were absent. Much remains behind. Its power depends partly on the precision with which it carries what it can: the angle of a wrist, the direction of a face, the position of one person in relation to another. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-014.jpg) For this essay, that is one way the ancient idea opens onto photography. **Mediation has a material form**. A person stood somewhere, chose a frame, and made an exposure. A later viewer receives a bounded view from that position. The dáimon also helps us ask what happens when a person feels addressed by something they cannot fully account for. The question may be religious, philosophical, or artistic. It can be approached without giving it the same answer in every setting. The room in Milan contains no visible proof of a divine presence. It contains human beings acting together. From their photographs comes a sustained inquiry into why such an encounter can feel worthy of a name older than any of its participants. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-015.jpg) ## A sign that interrupts Another Greek account changes the direction of the question. In Plato's *Apology*, Socrates describes a sign he has experienced since childhood. It intervenes to restrain him from something he is about to do. He specifically says that it does not command him to act. The familiar term *daimonion* in this context concerns a divine sign, and should not simply be substituted for every other use of dáimon. [Plato, *Apology*, 31c–d](https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html?ref=abagofstories.com). That distinction introduces a pause into a subject often described through forward movement. A calling is easily pictured as pressure toward a destination: something urges, something follows. The Socratic account gives attention another task. It may involve recognizing a limit. For the purposes of this reading, the limit is valuable. A strong inward conviction does not settle what a person ought to do. The presence of another person still matters. So **do the consequences of acting**. The dance makes this question tangible without answering it philosophically. One figure approaches another. An arm extends. Weight shifts. The next movement will have to take account of a body already there. In a photograph, that requirement can become visible as a small remaining space between two hands. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-016.jpg) We do not know which impulses the dancers followed or withheld. Their interior decisions are not recorded. What we can see is that each movement takes place among conditions: the floor, the distance, the other's position, the available support. Freedom has a place in which to work. This is also a useful discipline for the person writing about the images. An interpretation can feel persuasive long before it is justified. The sequence may invite a narrative of resistance overcome, or fear transformed, or **a destiny finally accepted**. None of those inward events can be established from posture alone. To stop before making such a claim is a form of attention. It leaves the person's experience with them. Their words may later tell us more. Ferraris has offered her account of reciprocal self-giving. Gasparotto has offered his account of dance as a guide. Those statements deserve their own place in the story. The older texts allow the question of calling to become more exact. Urgency and restraint can both enter the discussion. A person may feel summoned and still need to ask how to respond, what to leave alone, and whose life will be affected. **A photograph makes no audible demand**. It can nevertheless hold us before an action long enough to examine the space around it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-017.jpg) ## The life one chooses Near the end of Plato's *Republic*, the question takes the form of a story told by a man who has returned from death. Er sees souls preparing for another life. They draw lots determining the order of selection and choose among lives laid before them. Their choices carry responsibility. Afterward, each is sent with the guardian associated with the chosen life. The narrative moves through the Fates toward forgetting and rebirth. Its dáimon accompanies the fulfillment of a choice. [Plato, *Republic*, book X, especially 617d–620e](https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html?ref=abagofstories.com). The story gives choice an unsettling scale. **The chooser cannot remain outside what has been chosen**. A life has to be inhabited. Its apparent attractions and its eventual demands may be different things. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-018.jpg) For the reader of *Dáimon / All’improvviso*, the myth provides a way into the word destiny. It also creates a difficulty worth preserving. We are being asked to imagine a choice that precedes the ordinary memory of choosing. The life is lived with an origin hidden from the person living it. This is the terrain on which James Hillman develops his account of calling. Maria Grazia Monaco, who wrote the book's philosophical essays, brings the myth of Er into conversation with Hillman's work. Through that reading, the guardian becomes associated with an image of a particular life, a singularity seeking expression. The difference between a myth and a description of actual events must remain clear. Nothing in the Milan encounter establishes that the participants chose their lives before birth. The account offers a language for thinking about their practices and the experience they made together. Myths can have this use. **They give a question a shape large enough to inhabit**. A person can approach the shape, examine it, find it illuminating, and still remain uncertain about the beliefs attached to it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-019.jpg) The idea of a forgotten choice may speak to the experience of recognizing something late. Ayzoh! had already been interested in the dáimon, but the photographs gave that interest a form they had not anticipated. **The recognition followed the event**. That temporal pattern belongs to their testimony. Its resemblance to a larger story is something the book explores. There is an ethical boundary to that exploration. The myth cannot tell us that someone has chosen the deprivation, exclusion, or violence they endure. To say that a person is responsible for how they act is different from claiming that they authored every condition under which they must act. A narrative of destiny becomes cruel if it is used to make another person's suffering seem deserved. **The photographs need no such claim**. Their people are present in a room, making something possible for one another. We can attend to their freedom at that scale. We can ask what they offered and how the offer changed in another person's presence. The larger question stays open: how does a life come to feel like one's own? A myth can accompany the question. The answer still has to meet the lives people actually have. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-020.jpg) ## Dance, all of a sudden Claudio Gasparotto's contribution returns the discussion to a lifelong practice. The book identifies him as a dancer, choreographer, and educator, the founder of **Movimento Centrale — Danza & Teatro**, and a practitioner whose research attends to the expressive body. His text names dance as his guiding spirit. This is his reflective account, published after the event. Its language about the dáimon should be read in that light. It does not establish a scenario planned for the improvisation. > Dáimon means divine messenger, a guiding spirit we receive before birth and of which we are unaware. James Hillman says it is the key to deciphering the soul's code, the calling that has always been within us. > > If we consider the curiosity and wonder with which children — and adults, too — observe their own bodies, we can sense that a precious mystery exists within us. This profound wonder is the principal source of religion, philosophy, and dance. But dance does not explain; it comes into contact with the mystery. > > Gillian Hobart defines the dancer as a messenger between heaven and earth, and Gustav Jung, in The Red Book, suggests that “life does not require seriousness. On the contrary: it is better to dance through it.” So, encouraged by these authoritative references and at the same time intimidated, I let myself be guided by the guiding spirit I had chosen before birth: dance. > > Thus, in an empty space, while in the adjacent room Camp Erech was taking place, the exhibition of images Ayzoh! made in the Adrar desert, in Mauritania, to tell the story of Yahya, a seeker of meaning, an improvisation arose from nothing: a silent dialogue to share the precious mystery of life, a kind of transmigration of bodies. All of a sudden. > > *Dance, All of a Sudden — Claudio Gasparotto* Gasparotto's account makes a distinction between explanation and contact. Dance gives him a way of approaching what he calls mystery. The word belongs to his experience of the practice. It has the force of something he has chosen to name. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-021.jpg) The lack of advance planning in Milan did not mean the participants arrived without histories. **Their practices were already part of their lives**. Gasparotto brought dance; Ferraris brought her work as a dancer, painter, and art therapist; Marino brought music. Zhang and Lerario brought photography. Those histories met in circumstances none of them had arranged for this particular work. The resulting images allow preparation and surprise to share the same frame. We need not invent a rehearsal to recognize skill in a difficult balance. We need not invent a symbolic intention to see how readily a gesture can become available to interpretation. The book gives both dancers space to speak. Ferraris writes through the sensation of the event. Gasparotto places his practice in conversation with ideas and teachers. Their contributions differ in pace and vocabulary. **Preserving both in full keeps that difference audible**. Their words also prevent the philosophical essay from becoming the only authority over the photographs. Each participant can speak about the encounter from within a different relation to it. The reader receives several approaches to the same brief span of time. Gasparotto's final phrase returns to suddenness. The title of the book does the same. However far the thought travels, its origin remains an improvisation in a room beside an exhibition. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-022.jpg) ## The acorn and the conditions of growth In *The Soul's Code*, James Hillman proposes what he calls the acorn theory. An individual life carries a particular image, as an acorn carries the possibility of an oak. Calling belongs to that singularity: something seeks a form through which it can be lived. This is an imaginative and psychological proposal about character and vocation. [James Hillman, *The Soul's Code*, publisher's description](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/80069/the-souls-code-by-james-hillman/?ref=abagofstories.com); [Scott London, interview with James Hillman](https://www.scott.london/interviews/hillman.html?ref=abagofstories.com). Monaco develops the image in the book's essay on Hillman. She describes a uniqueness that asks to be lived. Her reading links the dáimon with the problem of recognizing a calling whose presence may precede a person's ability to explain it. The acorn is memorable because it gives this problem a small, familiar form. Something that can be held in a hand belongs to a life far larger than itself. Its future has become imaginable without becoming immediately visible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-023.jpg) As a metaphor for a person, it also asks difficult questions. Who gets to say what the oak is supposed to look like? Who recognizes the calling, and with what authority? An adult can take a child's interest seriously, or place so much expectation upon it that the interest has no room to change. A person can find courage in the thought of a vocation, or become trapped by an image of themselves that once seemed exact. The useful pressure of Hillman's proposal is toward **attention to singularity**. It asks us to consider whether a life exceeds the familiar accounts used to explain it. The difficulty begins when an image of singularity hardens into a prescription. A person must retain the freedom to surprise the story told about them. The photographs offer a modest way to hold that freedom. Ferraris and Gasparotto appear in successive arrangements. Any single image could be made to define them: the one who reaches, the one who receives, the one who lifts, the one who rests. The next image loosens the definition. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-024.jpg) That is also why the metaphor of growth should keep its surroundings. An acorn needs conditions in which to grow. In a human life, opportunity, education, material security, and the presence of other people enter the possibilities available to a calling. No account of inward purpose can make those conditions irrelevant. For an organization working with communities, the distinction has practical weight. To recognize a person's capacities is to remain interested in what allows those capacities to be exercised. It is possible **to honor a particular life** while asking what stands in its way. The language of destiny should never relieve others of responsibility for the conditions they help create. In Milan, the conditions were specific. An exhibition brought people into proximity. A room was available. The artists had their practices. The photographers could reach their cameras. A work became possible at the intersection of those circumstances. The dáimon, in Ayzoh!'s reading, names something they recognized within that encounter. The circumstances remain part of its story. So do the people who made themselves available to one another, each bringing an ability whose next use had not been settled in advance. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-025.jpg) ## The figures that address us The book's essays also approach the dáimon through Carl Gustav Jung. Monaco follows his accounts of inner figures, encounters with the unconscious, and the work of individuation. These are presented as ways of thinking about a life that is not fully transparent to the person living it. In her account, individuation concerns the development of a person's particularity through a changing relation between conscious and unconscious life. The Self has a **wider scope** than the everyday sense of the “I.” These are terms within a psychological framework. Their value here lies in the questions they allow the book to ask about identity and inward experience. The volume itself introduces a distinction that should stay visible. After exploring relations between the dáimon and the Self, Monaco cites Hillman's insistence that the two should not be treated as interchangeable. A personified figure or an inciting voice is different from an account of psychic totality. The disagreement gives the reader room to examine the terms rather than melt them into a single vocabulary of the soul. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-026.jpg) An inner figure can be approached as someone with whom a conversation becomes possible. There is a shape, a voice, a position to respond to. Such personification provides a way to give attention to experiences that might otherwise remain indistinct. In the context of this book, it offers another route toward understanding why a human figure in a photograph could become associated with an inward calling. Yet the photograph **places an actual person before us**. Gasparotto has a name, a history, a practice, and his own account of the meeting. His availability to symbolic interpretation does not erase those things. The same is true of Ferraris. Neither can be reduced to a component in someone else's interior drama. The remark about dancing that Gasparotto invokes comes from a dialogue in *The Red Book* involving the Red One. The identity of the speaker matters. A sentence inside an encounter between voices has a different force from an isolated maxim. The source book identifies that context in its own discussion of Jung, at pages 52–53. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-027.jpg) Here, too, the presence of more than one voice changes the work. The reader can hear a proposition, an objection, an invitation, a hesitation. Meaning develops through a relation. It need not be settled by the first statement that attracts us. **The photographs have a comparable capacity to keep a relation active**. We can look at the lift and then at the later resting body. We can consider the figure of a guide and then see the guide supported. Each view alters the authority of the one before it. This essay follows the book's interest in inward life while keeping its claims at the level the material supports. The dance supplies no diagnosis and no evidence of a psychological cure. Its participants have offered an account of an encounter, and the images invite close attention to what they made. That is already a substantial subject. A person's life includes experiences whose significance takes time to emerge. The word *dáimon* becomes one way of staying with such an experience long enough for further questions to become possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-028.jpg) ## The weight of another person At the center of the sequence is a lift. Gasparotto bends forward. Ferraris lies across his back, her body extending beyond him. His feet remain on the floor. Her legs reach into the space behind him. The curve of the two bodies cuts across the straight lines that recede toward the end of the room. The photograph makes weight visible through posture. It also preserves the labor of support. Gasparotto's bent knees and inclined torso are part of the image's structure. Ferraris's body contributes its own shape to the balance. The two figures form an arrangement that neither could make alone. Seen within Ayzoh!'s interpretation, the image can suggest a passage toward destiny. The association comes readily: a guide carries another person onward. But the sequence asks us to keep watching. The carry is one configuration of their relation, and it will change. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-029.jpg) Later, Gasparotto rests his head against Ferraris's legs. She is seated on the floor. Her hand lies on him. The photograph comes close enough for the bodily arrangement to occupy much of the frame. The broad gesture of the lift has given way to contact at ground level. In another view, the head and hands become closer still. The reader can examine a point of contact that, within the ten minutes, may have passed quickly. The picture gives it duration without supplying a statement about what it meant to either person. There is no need to call this surrender or healing. What we see is **support taking another direction**. The body previously carrying is now supported. Ferraris's presence changes the possible meaning of the guide. She is active in the relation through which that figure has become visible. Her text's account of reciprocal offering gains force beside these images. It gives the reader a participant's language for considering what the sequence shows. The interpretation is grounded in her words as well as in the changing postures. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-030.jpg) This is one reason the full sequence matters more than any single emblem. A cover photograph might hold the lift before us so insistently that everything else becomes secondary. Moving through the work restores the other arrangements: distance, parallel movement, approach, rest. The narrative acquires several centers. **The floor is one of them**. It receives feet, knees, hands, and the length of a body. However far an image seems to reach toward an idea of transcendence, the ground remains in view. Its marks keep the action located. These people are carrying weight on a surface with a particular texture and history of use. A documentary photograph can hold such ordinary facts alongside symbolic possibility. The body may suggest a myth while continuing to require balance. The hand may suggest guidance while remaining a hand extended toward another person. The strongest reading leaves both available. It allows the dáimon to enter the photograph without sending the dancers away. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-031.jpg) ## The music the photograph cannot play Vincenzo Marino was part of the improvisation. His saxophone enters the visible sequence, and the images make the relation between musician and dancer part of the book's record. In one photograph, Marino stands with the instrument while Gasparotto extends into a broad movement nearby. The musician's posture and the dancer's lifted foot share the same floor. Elsewhere, Gasparotto is down on his knees and Marino stands beside him, the saxophone held across his body. A still photograph keeps the instrument's shape. It cannot return the sound made in those ten minutes. The account available here does not establish a melody, a tempo, or the order in which particular sounds and gestures arose. To supply them would be to compose a second performance in prose. **Marino's presence is nevertheless essential**. Without it, a reader could mistake the event for a duet accompanied only by the photographers. His place in the encounter belongs in its opening account, even though the book brings him prominently into view later. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-032.jpg) Ferraris and Gasparotto both use the language of silence in their contributions. With a musician present, their words can be read as descriptions of the exchange they experienced, without turning them into a claim that the room was acoustically silent. The testimony and the visible instrument can remain together. This is one of the **useful incompletenesses of the work**. Photography has preserved something that music and movement alone would not have left in the same form. Other dimensions of the event remain beyond the page. The reader receives a record with an edge. That edge can make attention more exact. We look at how the musician holds himself, at the space between him and the dancer, at the relation of their positions. We recognize his contribution without pretending to hear it. The image carries the presence of a sound it cannot reproduce. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-034.jpg) ## What is written Long before the photographs acquired their title, Ayzoh! had been interested in affinities between the dáimon and ideas from other cultural and religious traditions. The appeal was the possibility of a conversation across differences: how people speak about what precedes choice, what calls for a response, and what they understand only afterward. One of the words in that conversation is *maktub*. The Arabic *maktūb* means “written”; its root belongs to the vocabulary of writing and also appears in contexts of prescribing or ordaining. In the expression familiar as “it is written,” writing becomes associated with destiny. [Quranic Arabic Corpus, dictionary of the root k-t-b](https://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=ktb&ref=abagofstories.com). The Qur'an speaks in 57:22–23 of what occurs being in a record before it is brought into being, and connects that knowledge with a response to loss and to what has been given. Another passage, 53:39, gives weight to human striving. These passages place divine determination and human action within the same field of inquiry. [Qur'an 57:22–23](https://quran.com/en/al-hadid/22-23?ref=abagofstories.com); [Qur'an 53:39](https://legacy.quran.com/53/39?ref=abagofstories.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-033-1.jpg) The comparison with the dáimon is suggestive precisely where a difference remains. The image of something written and the image of a personal guide approach the question from different directions. One evokes a record whose full extent a person cannot read. The other gives the sense of accompaniment a figure. In relation to the photographs, the question becomes one of hindsight. Looking backward can make an event appear necessary. We recognize a pattern and feel that **it must have been waiting for us**. The documented circumstances of Milan remain more open: people met, an improvisation occurred, and a reading developed later. The word *maktub* can enter the essay as a point of reflection on that experience. It cannot certify that the encounter had been ordained. Nor can one evocative expression stand in for the full range of Muslim thought and practice. What the comparison offers here is a question about humility before what exceeds our planning. The photographers planned no such sequence that day. **They did act**. They fetched the cameras, positioned themselves, and photographed. The absence of an advance design and the presence of human effort belong to the same account. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-035.jpg) ## An encounter called *bashert* Another word in Ayzoh!'s constellation is *bashert*. It is Yiddish, used for what is destined or intended, and especially familiar in talk about an intended partner. Chabad's account of the term places this usage in relation to the Talmudic image of a match announced before birth. [Chabad, “What Does ‘Bashert’ Mean?”](https://www.chabad.org/library/article%5Fcdo/aid/5524205/jewish/What-Does-Bashert-Mean.htm?ref=abagofstories.com). In *Sotah* 2a, the discussion includes a heavenly announcement concerning a pairing before the embryo is formed. The surrounding argument also considers the relation between matching and a person's deeds. Predestination enters a conversation rather than closing it. [Babylonian Talmud, *Sotah* 2a](https://www.sefaria.org/Sotah.2a?with=Tosafot&ref=abagofstories.com). For this essay, the interest lies in the way an encounter can be understood as meaningful beyond its immediate circumstances. After meeting someone, a person may look back and feel that their paths were somehow directed toward each other. The language of destiny gives that recognition a form. The Milan photographs concern an artistic encounter. They provide no basis for a romantic account of the dancers, and *bashert* should not be used to imply one. The comparison stays with the question of meeting: **what changes when another person enters the field of one's possibilities?** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-036.jpg) A solo gesture can be complete in itself. In these images, another person's presence changes its scale and direction. The room remains large enough for distance; the sequence makes approach consequential. A reach has someone before it. A balance has another body within it. Those visible relations help explain why the language of a destined encounter might attract a reader. The interpretation grows from the photograph's arrangement. It does not turn that attraction into a fact about the participants' beliefs. The word also invites a question beyond the moment of recognition. Whatever meaning an encounter acquires, the people within it **still have to respond to one another**. A sense that a meeting matters does not perform the work of attention. Each person remains a person, with a freedom that the other's story must accommodate. In the photographs, that freedom appears in successive movements. The relation is continually made again. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-037.jpg) ## What has been entrusted The Christian comparison Ayzoh! brings to this inquiry is **the parable of the talents** in Matthew's Gospel. A man leaving on a journey entrusts different amounts of his property to three enslaved people. Two increase what they receive. The third, afraid, buries the money and returns it unchanged. The master's return brings praise for the first two and a severe judgment upon the third. Within the story, the talents are sums of money. The familiar association with personal abilities is an interpretive extension. [Matthew 25:14–30](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14-30&version=NRSVUE&ref=abagofstories.com). The passage has a harshness that a pleasant lesson about creativity can obscure. Its fear, unequal distribution, and punishment remain part of the text. An artistic reading should acknowledge that difficulty while identifying the question it chooses to pursue. Here that question concerns what a person does with what has been entrusted to them. **A capacity asks for a use**. The use takes place among other people and has consequences beyond private satisfaction. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-038.jpg) This is a point of contact with the idea of calling, although the two accounts have different structures. In the parable, responsibility grows from an entrusted possession and an eventual accounting. In the book's reading of the dáimon, attention turns toward a singularity seeking expression. The comparison becomes useful when it helps us examine the response each account asks of a person. In Milan, abilities acquired over time were put to use in an unforeseen situation. A dancer could respond through movement. A musician could enter through sound. The photographers could make images. Their practices became available to a common event. There is a quiet generosity in making a capacity available in this way. That is an interpretation of what the meeting produced, supported by Ferraris's language of reciprocal offering. It makes no claim about the religious commitments of the people in the room. The parable's question can remain with the reader after its imagery has receded: **what becomes of an ability when it is exercised in relation to someone else?** The photographs answer at the scale of a brief encounter. The book extends the consequences of that encounter by giving others the chance to look. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-039.jpg) ## A later question in Guatemala The *Popol Vuh* entered Ayzoh!'s thinking later, during the Somos project in Guatemala. This connection belongs to a subsequent part of their history. It was absent from the original improvisation and from the first recognition of the dáimon in the photographs. To preserve that sequence is to let the inquiry grow in time. The book's question traveled with people who continued to work and encounter other cultural worlds. A later affinity could enlarge an earlier thought without having secretly directed it from the beginning. The *Popol Vuh* is a K'iche' Maya work whose account of origins includes the formation of the first people from maize. In Allen J. Christenson's translation, these people initially possess an extraordinary range of vision and knowledge. Their sight is subsequently limited. These episodes offer material for a reflection on received life and the boundaries of human knowing. They do not establish an equivalent of the Greek dáimon. [*Popol Vuh*, translated and annotated by Allen J. Christenson, especially pp. 180–186](https://www.mesoweb.org/publications/Christenson/PopolVuh.pdf?ref=abagofstories.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-040.jpg) This is a textual connection proposed within the present essay. Ayzoh!'s account establishes when the affinity became part of their thinking; it does not identify the particular episode that first suggested it. That first discovery can remain theirs without furnishing it with an invented conversation or scene. The question of vision has a particular resonance beside photographs. The people who made these images were able to recognize something in them later that they had not formulated while taking them. **Their seeing changed with time**. It remained situated, dependent on what had been preserved and on the ideas they brought to it. For the reader, the limit of sight can become a useful part of the comparison. A frame shows a portion of a room. It preserves a posture and leaves its duration uncertain. It gives access to another person's appearance while leaving their inward experience beyond direct possession. The K'iche' text has its own history and meanings. Those must have space within any conversation to which it is invited. It should be possible for a comparison to alter our original question, to ask something we had not prepared to ask. Otherwise, the other work has only been recruited to confirm what we already believed. The Guatemala connection therefore keeps this essay open. A ten-minute encounter in Milan continues to receive new readings. The passage through other traditions can be undertaken with attention to their names, contexts, and differences, allowing each to remain larger than the use made of it here. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-041.jpg) ## The people around the image Toward the end of the sequence, Gloria Lisi appears. She had come as a visitor to Camp Erech. A longtime friend of Gasparotto, Lerario, and Zhang, and a former deputy mayor of Rimini, she belongs to the actual company gathered around the exhibition. Her presence brings the story back from a wide field of ideas to the people in the room. She has a name and a reason for being there. The images need no additional role invented for her. They record her presence within the unfolding encounter. Near this part of the book is a photograph of a person holding a camera while seated with the dancers. The instrument that usually remains outside the frame has entered it. Photography becomes visible among the activities taking place in the room. **That view changes the reader's position**. We have been looking through cameras at people. Now a camera and its holder are among the people we look at. The arrangement reminds us that the work was made from within an encounter whose participants could see one another. The collective signature belongs here, too. Every photograph is credited to Ayzoh!, jointly to Giulia Zhang and Claudio Maria Lerario. The reader is offered their work together. The credit carries responsibility for what has been selected, sequenced, and published. The photographs' joint authorship does not make the rest of the encounter anonymous. Ferraris and Gasparotto remain the dancers. Marino remains the musician. Gloria remains a person who came to the exhibition. Each has a different relation to what took place. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-042.jpg) The book brings further work into the encounter. Maria Grazia Monaco develops its philosophical essays. The dancers contribute their own accounts. Ayzoh! gives the material a graphic form. Having helped shape the Camp Erech exhibition, I take on the book’s production, with Gloria Lisi also contributing to the project. Through this shared work, ten minutes of improvisation become a publication. This later labor has a different rhythm from the improvisation. A sequence must be considered. Words must be placed beside images. A reader must be given ways to enter and move through the work. The book's spacious photographs and intervening texts distribute attention over something that was once brief. The passage into a book also makes accountability possible. The contributors can be named. The sources of its ideas can be identified. The difference between the event and its later interpretation can be explained. The reader can follow how the work came to acquire its title. That history is part of its value for *A Bag of Stories*. The encounter shows a way of **making work with other people**: each contributes a practice, and the resulting form belongs to what happened among them. The later publication preserves the different contributions while offering a shared sequence. The image of the solitary person following an inward call has been joined by another: a room in which several practices meet. The question of vocation remains individual enough to respect each person's history and open enough to include what their meeting made possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/09/daimon-043.jpg) ## Ten minutes, a week, a book The record has three measures of time. The improvisation lasts ten minutes. The interpretation begins a week later. The book gives those two moments a form that can be returned to, and later encounters carry the inquiry further. Each measure changes **the kind of attention available**. During the improvisation, the photographers respond quickly. Looking at the images afterward, they can recognize patterns across the sequence. Reading the book, someone who was never in Milan can pause at an image and approach the thought from elsewhere. The sequence remains important through all three. The artists have confirmed that the photographs follow the course of the event. We can trust their order without claiming to know the number of seconds between exposures. The spaces between images preserve an unmeasured part of the ten minutes. To look slowly is to enter a duration that the performers did not have. We can remain with the raised hand, then move toward the photograph in which the hand supports a head. We can turn back. The page makes comparison possible, and comparison changes meaning. --- --- **There is a freedom in that return**. An image that first seemed to show one person directing another may become part of a relation in which direction changes. The initial interpretation can survive while becoming less certain of its own boundaries. That is the dáimon this work makes available to thought: a figure recognized afterward, through human forms that remain capable of exceeding it. It draws the reader toward questions of calling and destiny, then places those questions among other bodies, other voices, other accounts of what it means to receive a life. The photographs retain smaller facts. A foot lifts. A knee bends. A face turns toward another face. A saxophone occupies the space beside a dancer. These details keep the essay answerable to the encounter from which it began. Return to the photograph of Gasparotto resting against Ferraris. Her legs are folded on the floor. His head is close to her hand. Equipment remains visible behind them. The room has not disappeared into the symbol. In the earlier lift, his back carried her weight. Here, the arrangement has changed. The person read as the guide is being held. The image leaves them there, in that relation, for as long as we are willing to look. --- ### Camp Erech: the exhibition in the next room Presented at BASE Milano during Milan Design Week in April 2023, [***Camp Erech***](https://abagofstories.com/an-exhibition-in-a-box-some-assembly-required/) grew from Ayzoh!'s documentary and community photography project in Mauritania's Adrar desert. At its center were **Riccardo De Biase**, known as Yahya, Fatimatou, their family, and the community around their desert camp. A former fashion photographer, Yahya had settled in Mauritania and built a life with Fatimatou, welcoming travelers and developing journeys through the region. The project brought together photographs by Ayzoh! and images made by girls from Camp Erech after a short photography course. The exhibition's photographs were credited collectively. Daily life, oral traditions, education, women's experiences, and the relationship between the community and its surroundings formed part of its inquiry. Alongside the documentary work, the project sought to strengthen locally run tourism and the livelihoods connected with it. *A Bag of Stories* will soon publish a series of articles about the project in Mauritania, returning to Camp Erech, the people who shaped it, and the stories they shared. --- ### Source and translation note This article grew out of *Dáimon / All’improvviso* (Ayzoh!, 2023), a book I helped bring into being, with photographs by Ayzoh!, essays by Maria Grazia Monaco, and contributions by Silvia Ferraris and Claudio Gasparotto. Ferraris’s and Gasparotto’s texts appear here in full, translated from the Italian for this article. The quotation from Jung within Gasparotto’s contribution follows the Italian wording he used. --- ### Book credits **Philosophical essays**: Maria Grazia Monaco. **Contributions:** Silvia Ferraris and Claudio Gasparotto. **Photography**: Ayzoh! — Giulia Zhang and Claudio Maria Lerario, jointly. **Dance:** Silvia Ferraris and Claudio Gasparotto. **Music:** Vincenzo Marino. **Graphic design**: Ayzoh! **Production**: Emmanuel Edson. **Collaboration**: Gloria Lisi. **The book thanks**: BASE Milano, CSPL (Centro Studi di Psicologia e Letteratura), Movimento Centrale — Danza & Teatro, and Waga Studio.