Two archaic stories that take place at the same time.
At first glance, they could not be more different: In the cinematic narrative, we accompany a speechless female figure on her way into an abandoned marble cave, which she covers crawling and on all fours. Her movement is documented slowly and alternately from her own perspective and an outside view. We can also see her pausing and searching between the rubble and the unreal smooth walls of a marble birth canal. Only the sounds she makes herself and the dripping of the cave are audible.
While our eyes follow her into the darkness below ground, a completely different story unfolds before our inner eye: A hunting scene that takes place in the full light of day on a high plateau in Lapland, the highest point under the open sky. The language in which the hunting scene is told is unadorned, impartial. It is the skeleton of a language, poor in adjectives, raw - the archetype tolerates no dilution. The narrative could hardly be more dramatic. It is an eternal tale of men who kill animals - as they have always done in order to survive. The slain animals are an elk cow and her calf - and here the mother room opens up again.
So while we accompany the woman in her exhausted crawl into the uterine cavity, the deliberately spoken word simultaneously draws us upwards and into a fast-paced action. The place where both narratives meet is also their common origin: the myth and the archaic certainty of life and death within the “Great Mother”. We enter the realms of the Sumerian shadow sisters Inana and Ereshkigal, the cycles of Persephone and Demeter - in so many cultures we find the idea of the duality of the feminine and its completion in its union.
The subterranean quest of the Creeping One ends in the dark amniotic lake, touched by the tip of a marble monolith jutting down from the vaulted ceiling. She has arrived at the center of the myth.
Each story describes a semi-circle which, like the world serpent, unite to form a complete circle. In it, summer and winter, light and darkness, becoming and passing away, yesterday and tomorrow take place for all eternity.
The project is part of the subthemes The Ecology of Language - Poetry and Environmental Action, Healing Narratives - Poetry, Mental Health and Collective Trauma.
Author
Tanja Leonhardt
Freelance visual artist and author.
She studied Literature, Psychology and Fine Art at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.
She has been writing poetry since her studies, which can be found in her artist books, in anthologies and magazines or directly at her readings.
In the course of her land art experience, she is now also creating videopoetries that can be experienced on her YouTube channel. Her most recent project is the writing performance that she takes on stage together with her colleague.
