Synkroniciti is honored to feature poet Natasha Heidsieck Mak and filmmaker Michel Pavlou’s soulful video poem, “Inconsolable” in our upcoming “Transcend” issue. We were completely transported by this meditation on life, death and grief, which won our first video contest hands-down. Passionate, melancholic and yet hopeful, Natasha’s eloquent poetry and expressive recitation combine seamlessly with Michel’s images and a delightful musical score to create a mesmerizing world. Everything is so polished and well-crafted that it is almost unbelievable that this is but the first of a forthcoming series of video poems by this talented duo. Natasha, her musical voice rippling with emotion, follows a dying spirit, bird-like, up the stairs and out the window into the great beyond, taking us as far as she can before “there is nothing left to be.” Left behind, she casts words and thoughts in a direction which the living cannot yet follow but intuition approaches.
You won’t want to miss Natasha’s inspired poetry. Please purchase the issue or subscribe here. The online issue debuts November 30th.
Michel and Natasha met in 1978 in the Greek islands and corresponded for a short time before each settled in new lands and lost touch with one another. Forty-two years later, in the middle of a pandemic, they found each other again and began an artistic collaboration. “Inconsolable” is the first chapter of that collaboration. I’ll let Michel introduce Natasha, then move on to her own words. You can read more of their enchanting story in the issue.
Natasha Heidsieck Mak, is the daughter of a French father (from the Heidsieck champagne family) and a Russian mother (Lily Mak, actress / poet / artist, a leading figure of the existentialists in Greece where the family had immigrated to in the 1930’s), and also the granddaughter of the Russian painter Pavel Petrovic Ivanoff, known as Paul Mak, official portraitist of the Shah of Iran Pahlevi and of Helena Kourskaja. Natasha spent her childhood on the Greek island of Hydra, in the community of international artists who settled there since the 50s.
Natasha Heidsieck Mak is the pen name of Natalie Heidsieck.
I was born in London in 1961, of Russian-French parentage, and raised on the Greek island of Hydra. At that time, islanders relied upon paraffin lamps, drinking water from wells and church bells to start each day. Initially home educated, I was later sent to the local school, where until seventeen Greek was my first language. My love of English developed whilst perched in the windows of our cottage above the waves, reading the Metaphysical poets and Shakespeare. With a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, I moved to England, where the words of the poets read in childhood helped build new stages and worlds. I now travel between both places, finely caught between cultures, languages and time.