Yesterday we visited the Tamgaly (Tanbaly) Petroglyphs in Kazakhstan, a UNESCO World Heritage site where more than 3,500-year-old rock carvings continue to speak across time.
Standing before these Bronze Age images, I danced with a white cloth—a simple gesture of respect, echoing the ritual traditions that have long connected bodies, landscape, and memory. It did not feel like performing for the stones, but listening with them.
Among the most striking carvings are the mysterious sun-headed figures, associated with the Andronovo cultural horizon (16th–12th century BCE) and linked to earlier Okunev traditions of Southern Siberia. These images seem to stand at the threshold between the human and the cosmic, reminding us that ritual, movement, and belief have always been intertwined.
The Andronovo people were Bronze Age pastoralists, metalworkers, and settlers who lived across the vast steppes stretching from the Southern Urals to the Altai and Kazakhstan. Centuries later, this world evolved into the Pazyryk culture (6th–3rd century BCE), the remarkable nomadic civilisation of the Altai Mountains, renowned for its frozen burial mounds, extraordinary textiles, tattooed mummies, and the Scythian animal style. Rather than two isolated cultures, they represent successive chapters of the same landscape, where technological change and environmental adaptation transformed settled pastoralists into mobile nomads.
Nearby burial mounds preserve traces of this later Scythian world. Here, the visual language of geometric Bronze Age symbols gradually gives way to griffins, deer, birds of prey, and other hybrid beings that would define the art of the Altai. The griffin, in particular, becomes a powerful guardian between worlds—a figure that continues to resonate deeply with my own artistic research.
Tomorrow is my last day in Kazakhstan, yet this visit feels like the beginning rather than the end. Tamgaly has opened another path in my research, linking Kazakhstan, the Altai Mountains, and the living memory carried through images, movement, and the body.
Some places preserve history. Others continue to activate it.