About the place

“I am only Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Just an ordinary seagull. Nature has drawn my limits. If I were meant to know more about flying, I would have diagrams instead of brains in my head. If I were meant to fly at dizzying speed, I would have the short wings of a falcon and feed on mice instead of fish. I must put these foolish ideas out of my mind. I must return home to my flock and be content with what has been allotted to me – the humble life of an ordinary gull.
Yet I cannot escape the thought that I am free to be myself and that no one can prevent me. That is the eternal law of the Great Gull.”
The ancient Greek sculpture “Winged Victory of Samothrace” depicts the goddess of victory. She is a bird-woman greeting museum visitors at the top of the Louvre staircase, proud and powerful despite having lost her right wing and her head, yet never losing the inner strength to surrender herself to freedom.
Sculptor Petras Mazūras was inspired to carve “Black Woman” from basalt by the American writer Richard Bach’s novella “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and by the Greek Nike.
Mazūras’s woman has a head, but it is hidden between two clasped arms pulling her garment away from herself. Her face emerges in a piece of fabric. The woman slips free of daily worries, duties and fatigue – freeing herself in order to be herself.
This is Petras Mazūras’s Nike. This is Petras Mazūras’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
A loop, a slow roll and a barrel roll, an inverted spin, a fan and a turn…
Jonathan Livingston Seagull rises together with two radiant gulls and disappears into a sky as black as night itself.
Think of love – those are the Teacher’s last words to us.