Allgemein

«You are a Witch by saying aloud, «I am a Witch» three times, and thinking about that.» The fact that people today would voluntarily call themselves «witches» could not have been foreseen when the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe claimed countless victims. People who were inconvenient to the majority society and who defied the patriarchal order were defamed as witches. This cruel chapter in the history of mankind was also written in the 17th century in the Bergell region of Switzerland. The burning of a woman accused of witchcraft and the beheading of fourteen women and four men are recorded. Other victims died under torture or were banished. In her oeuvre, Lena Maria Thüring often takes up socio-political and gender-political themes and deals with them in multi-faceted video and audio installations. Accordingly, the Bergell witch hunt is the starting point for «Down the River»: video recordings depict nature and a mysterious ceremony that concludes with the handing over of ashes to the river Maira. Whereas in the past witches were not buried in the ground for fear that their souls might continue to work, the transfer to the water symbolizes a release instead.

At the same time, the video shows hands handling herbs in the production facility of Soglio-Produkte AG, which manufactures care products from regional raw materials. Thüring thus makes visible a historical reversal: while people with knowledge of (healing) herbs lived dangerously in the days of witch hunts, today an empowering reappropriation of this knowledge is taking place in the «modern witch lab.» The soundtrack includes questions translated into Bargaiot from documents on the witch trials as well as pop culture fragments spoken by the Choro Bregaglia. The gradual blurring of the roles of the accused and the accuser makes evident the arbitrariness of the accusations made against witches, and the translation into a pop-cultural language updates the theme for today. Together with the companies Soglio-Produkte and Essencia, Thüring developed a fragrance that is available to visitors. Based on the fragrance Hedion, which influences human behavior by promoting reciprocal behaviors, the perfume smells seductive and exemplifies the often sexually connoted power attributed to the witch. With its references to nature and its efficacy, the work addresses the discomfort of a world whose faith in technology is waning in the face of looming environmental crises and in which new (old) forms of knowledge are being sought. In addition, «Down the River» is characterized by the feminist reappropriation of (historical) female figures: «difficult women» can be role models and their «transgressions» can be understood as acts of resistance. Whereas in the past individuals were vilified as witches, in the renaissance of the witch that has been ongoing since the 1970s, the designation is self-empowing.

Sarah Wiesendanger, Zürich, CH

«Liquid Connections» is a project, that has evolved over several exhibitions, culminating with a video installation and display of recent sculptures. It introduces a setting, which oscillates between the strange and the familiar. The core of the video, in all its iterations, is a dense, poetic text collage; a science-fiction siren’s song of salt, sex, deep-time, life cycles and multispecies thinking. The main protagonist is water, the conductive, generative brine that connects us all. Fluids, both amniotic and fluvial, oceanic and cytoplasmic, flowing, oozing, dripping through the story of life on earth. For «we are all bodies of water» dissolving into each other, an amorphous liquid subjectivity that links us to those «primeval amniotic waters gestating us all». These quotes are from Thüring’s prose-poem; a «prose-poem» is itself an aberration of genre, anoverflow, a transgressive form that deploys thought-rhymes. Thus, images overlap and intertwine with one another, in a «womb of words, womb of worlds».

The text takes in fragments from earth science studies and climate change research, alongside founding works of feminist science fiction (such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin) and gender theory (such as Donna Harraway, Astrida Neimanis). All of which is interspersed with infectious refrains from pop songs. These are then delivered with the delirious thrust of a creation myth over a roiling baseline. The video was filmed in a historic filtration plant and features two tentacular figures, like apparitions from the deep. It evokes a hydro-feminist world – an innovative posthuman feminist phenomenology, developed by Astrida Neimanis – which extends into the gallery space with crescent-shaped elements, that suggest wave movements and a scattered reef of glandular ceramic vessels. All of which is bathed in blue light, in tribute to cyanobacteria, the marine life-form intrinsic to biogeochemical cycles. In Donna Harraway’s words «some of the best thinking is done as storytelling», fictions have consequences for how we read ourselves into the world we inhabit, a sentiment delivered here with rapturous vehemence.

Leila Peacock, Zürich, CH

«You are a Witch by saying aloud, «I am a Witch» three times, and thinking about that.» The fact that people today would voluntarily call themselves «witches» could not have been foreseen when the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe claimed countless victims. People who were inconvenient to the majority society and who defied the patriarchal order were defamed as witches. This cruel chapter in the history of mankind was also written in the 17th century in the Bergell region of Switzerland. The burning of a woman accused of witchcraft and the beheading of fourteen women and four men are recorded. Other victims died under torture or were banished. In her oeuvre, Lena Maria Thüring often takes up socio-political and gender-political themes and deals with them in multi-faceted video and audio installations. Accordingly, the Bergell witch hunt is the starting point for «Down the River»: video recordings depict nature and a mysterious ceremony that concludes with the handing over of ashes to the river Maira. Whereas in the past witches were not buried in the ground for fear that their souls might continue to work, the transfer to the water symbolizes a release instead.

At the same time, the video shows hands handling herbs in the production facility of Soglio-Produkte AG, which manufactures care products from regional raw materials. Thüring thus makes visible a historical reversal: while people with knowledge of (healing) herbs lived dangerously in the days of witch hunts, today an empowering reappropriation of this knowledge is taking place in the «modern witch lab.» The soundtrack includes questions translated into Bargaiot from documents on the witch trials as well as pop culture fragments spoken by the Choro Bregaglia. The gradual blurring of the roles of the accused and the accuser makes evident the arbitrariness of the accusations made against witches, and the translation into a pop-cultural language updates the theme for today. Together with the companies Soglio-Produkte and Essencia, Thüring developed a fragrance that is available to visitors. Based on the fragrance Hedion, which influences human behavior by promoting reciprocal behaviors, the perfume smells seductive and exemplifies the often sexually connoted power attributed to the witch. With its references to nature and its efficacy, the work addresses the discomfort of a world whose faith in technology is waning in the face of looming environmental crises and in which new (old) forms of knowledge are being sought. In addition, «Down the River» is characterized by the feminist reappropriation of (historical) female figures: «difficult women» can be role models and their «transgressions» can be understood as acts of resistance. Whereas in the past individuals were vilified as witches, in the renaissance of the witch that has been ongoing since the 1970s, the designation is self-empowing.

Sarah Wiesendanger, Zürich, CH