Clara Thesis Outline & Proposal"

Clara Franke - BODIES OF WATER

Thesis submitted to: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the final examination for the degree of: Master of Arts in Fine Art & Design: Lens-Based.

Adviser: Steve Rushton

Second Reader: **

“Bodies of Water” is a ritualistic performance film which draws attention to the importance of recultivation and a gratitude oriented attitude towards natural resources.

5 Performers congregate around, and interact with ceramic instruments created by the artist, in an extraction lake; a lake which is a remnant of an exploited clay pit, that has been recultivated.

The instruments, similar to instruments present throughout the makers childhood, partially imitate birds and underline a song written in collaboration with the musician Mila Meijer. The song focusses on the motherly personification of nature as an entity, returning to the previously destroyed site.

Clara Franke has been working around the topics of community, ecofeminism, mythology and the deepening of our relationship with nature through artisanship and raising appreciation for organic materials and mindful production processes.

For “Bodies of Water”, the artist has choreographed a performance, celebrating the symbiosis we as humans share with more-than-human entities, especially when taking part in acts of re-cultivation.

The film feeds of aesthetics of Germanic folklore, inspired by nixies, water sprites.

It is a visualisation of hopeful future thinking, in alignment with the ideas of the solar punk movement. A literary and artistic movement focusing on utopias.

Body of water

fill the abyss

Fill the void

of what’s left behind.

Mother loads exhausted

but mothers returning.

BODIES OF WATER; THESIS DRAFT

Inspired by the literary and artistic movement Solar Punk, how can I write short stories relating to the performance film "Bodies of Water"?

The following collection of short stories reacts to the performance film “Bodies of Water”, as they connect to the themes of clay, water, music and the act of congregating; Seeking for moments of connection between humans and more-than-human entities. Losing oneself in the visceral experience of life and organic matter, seeking symbiosis and a mindset suspended from a sense of time.

The narratives are partially autobiographical and playfully move between guided meditation towards speculative fiction and mythological means of storytelling, all inspired by the artistic and literary movement Solar Punk.

Solar Punk focuses on imagining future oriented sustainable societies, emphasizing  the need for social change in matters of environmental and social justice. It envisions a symbiosis between humanity, nature and technology.

In a collectivistic approach a world is being imagined that can acknowledge the importance of artisanship as well as utopian visions of technology, which support the redevelopment of organic systems for example.

Solar Punk as well as the following stories are about creating hopeful narratives that inspire us to become caretakers of our natural world, instead of further feeding into common narratives of fear and suppression.

(The more speculative stories I am still working on, talking from the perspective of natural elements or depicting conversations between nature and human. The ones shows here are mostly autobiographical)

Dissolving

Let me take you on a journey through a cycle of metamorphosis, of physical sensations, suspended from a sense of time, present in the molecules that hold together in the form of your body-

Lie down and soften your gaze. Close your eyes. Focus on your breath. Four counts in. 1,2,3,4. 8 counts out. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Repeat. In 4, out 8. In 4, out 8. Watch your body expand and deflate with every breath-

Notice your body and all its sensations. Do you feel light? Do you feel heavy? Do you feel soft? Do you feel tense? Relax every muscle-

Imagine blue light filling your body with every breath. Blue light enters your body with every breath taken, while tension leaves it in with every exhale-

Imagine breathing the light into your feet, toes, soles, heels, ankles. Let blue travel up your shins, calves, up to your knees. Breath in 4, breath out 8. Move your focus up to your thighs, your hips, your back. Notice if there is any tension, if so, let it be loosened with waves of blue light that keeps entering your body. Move up your focus vertebrae by vertebrae. Notice the surface beneath you and where your back touches it. Is it warm, or is it cold? Notice the texture of your clothing on your skin. Is it moving with your breath?

Imagine the blue light washing down your arms until it reaches your wrists and the tips of your fingers. Let your attention wander back up your arms, past underarm, elbows and upper arm, towards your shoulders.

Pay attention to your shoulder blades touching the floor. Let also them fill with watery blue, traveling up your neck, washing away the last tension from your jaw, temples, forehead-

Finally scan your entire body and how the blue light moves through it from the top of your head to the tips of your fingers and toes. Waves of blue washing slowly from top to bottom-

You begin feeling water slowly immersing your body from the ground up. It moves up your side until it washes over you fully. Your body from blue light slowly dissolves and unites with the liquid surrounding it. The particles of your body have left behind the borders of your body. You can now move freely within this larger body of water that you have become one with. Imagine your molecules' movements. Are they fast? Are they slow? Are they moving alone or in groups? Observe the dance as you embrace the new surrounding-

Slowly you let yourself fall further into the water until you settle in the soft soil covering the dark floor. Luscious green algae moves rhythmically above you-

Becoming their nurture, you become part of the algae itself. Now you are moving rhythmically with them in the slow but steady waves of the water. You look up and in far distance you can see the sun rays bursting through the surface of the water-

A turtle swims past and begins to eat from your leaves. You enter the mouth of the turtle and move through its throat and stomach. As the minerals and vitamins of the algae nurture the animal's body, you become part of it as well. You are now a molecule in the body of the turtle-

Within this new body you begin moving along the waters, towards the surface of the water. Your surroundings become brighter and brighter as you move towards the sun's rays.

The water becomes warmer around you. Muffled, far away, you hear birds singing. Their songs are becoming louder as you move along upwards-

Finally you break through the surface of the water and take a deep breath of the crisp air.

You see the shore and swim towards it, moving your four legs in synchronized motions. Climbing onto the rocky shore, you see a form laying on a field of grass, only a few meters away from you. Flowers and grasses are moving gently around it in a soft breeze of wind.

It is a body very well known to you. Your human body. Bedded by the side of the waters, which you have just crawled out of. Slowly you walk towards yourself and with every step that you get closer to begin moving your awareness back into your human shape. You leave behind the form of the turtle with its shell and thick skin and become one again with the body you have left-

Once you have re-entered your own body fully, you start moving your fingers and toes carefully, regaining the human senses while you turn your head towards the turtle, watching it slowly sliding back into the waters, barely making a sound.

Bodies of Water

Our bodies of water

jump into

a body of water

turns into

bodies of water

jump into

a body of water.

Red Brick House

She grew up in a suburbia shaped from red brick houses hosting 2 perfectly normed, nuclear family constellations at a time.

She moved into a red brick house hosting 250 humans challenging these norms.

She moved into a red brick house with two other artists, tedious mice, pigeons that would release themselves in her room when the door would be left open and moths nibbling on her French berets.

She despises the color red more than anyone she ever met.

The Orkz

5am, New Years Eve. We are in the basement of an old hospital. In a little corner someone has created a small library. The shelves are lit with lamps that actually turn this cold, dusty space into a respectably comfortable nook. On the other side of the underground hallway a cat skeleton is being showcased in a glass box. We walk around a corner on which a hand drawn sign, hung on big pipes, tells us the way to the hot tub.

The hot tub is basically a self made pool, filled by hand with buckets of hot water. Considering whether or not to go into the tub that is already filled with around 15 naked people, two slightly drunk men try to tell us that there is no choice to be made. It is a clear situation. Of course you would go into the hot tub.

We decide to go back to the bar. On our left is a table, which previously was used during autopsies. Grooves in the table show where the blood would run down. Next to it is a foosball table. Further in, a group of people is dancing in trance-like movements to a dj performing on a small stage.

We sit down in the smoking room, a stuffy, neon color lit room. A man drops his joint, without realizing. He begins to roll another. I ask my friend Elisa what she thinks of this place, now that she has seen it after my many stories, not sure if this time of the year and night was the best to show it. “I love it.”

This old hospital, a community housing 250 people, has been my home for 3 ½ years. The hospital had opened its doors in 1925 but lost its purpose in May 1979. A new, bigger, hospital had been finished. The building was supposed to be demolished and replaced by apartments.

Instead, on the night of the 2nd to 3rd September of that same year, the watchman was being tricked to leave his position and about 100 squatters took over the building. The details of the story differ depending on the storyteller.

The date is celebrated every year. In 1985, it was declared legally inhabited.

First limited to the duration of 5 years a self-governing-experiment started. The ownership of the building stayed with the municipality, the renter being the newly founded association by the residents of the building. The third, and last, party in this arrangement was a local housing association, as the operating hand of the municipality.

Even through financial shortages, the 5 year experiment succeeded and continued.

There is a bar, cafe, cinema, a huge rooftop, a small organic shop, two gardens with the most beautiful walnut trees, and that hot tub in the basement, all of which one can/should take shifts for.

Three to four times a week everyone can come by the cafe, the public living room, to eat dinner, all organized by volunteers. I used to take over the dishwashing shifts, practicing my Dutch with kitchen appliances and food ingredients. My favorite part was the cleaning of the large kitchen floor, flooding the floor fully with a hose, while listening to music loudly, scrubbing away and finally swooshing the water down the drainages in the floor in generous movements, before kicking out the last few drunk neighbors from the bar and locking the doors.

The variety of lifestyles coexisting and sharing the same address is really hard to describe if one has not been here before. I have made a photobook about this place, trying to offer a peek inside, but even photographing 50+ inhabitants and their rooms only touches the surface of what one can really find here.

From a 6 year old switching effortlessly between 4 languages while chatting in the garden with people from all ages, to school, yoga or yiddish teachers, it does feel like everyone is welcome here.

This home is a home like no other. It is quite, well, punk.

Lehels House

A picturesque drive on a warm, late June day amongst the softly green, hilly landscape of the Hungarian countryside. On the back seat Azul, one of the three dogs in the silver Toyota is napping, his head rested on one of the three humans labs. He is napping too. Amber is driving. I am on the passenger seat. The atmosphere of this place, combined with our sisterly dynamic and flowy skirts remind me of Grimms fairytale Snow-White and Rose-Red. The story of two sisters living with their mother, spending their days pruning red and white roses.

A turn onto a sandy driveway brings us to a beautiful, white, cob house. The grass is high and the building overgrown by vine branches. The garden is a jungle from almond trees, nettles and tomato plants. Lehel, the old man who build the house himself with only 2 helpers, had been off the radar for a while now. People at the local market have been asking Amber about him, as he has not been selling his glasses of wheatgrass pulp, Manarax he calls it, over there for weeks by now. She doesn't know where he has been.

What she does know, is the code to his number lock and they let themselves in. At first sight the house seamed a little small, but when entering one is greeted with an open loft, all white and soft edged walls. Around 9pm they dip their naked bodies into the endless, turquoise lake Balaton, just a few minutes drive away. The rest of the night they spend inside the house from clay and straw, high, dancing on the various levels and on top of the huge clay oven in the center of it, singing, playing the guitar, wondering where the creator of this place could possibly be.

The next day they pack up and sneakily leave the house behind, lock locked again as if they had never been here.

Geophagia

At 10:36 on a Tuesday morning I get a text from Felix.

“Hi girl

Wanna be crazy and go to Kyrgyzstan with me?

Found flights for 70€”

"When?" "How?"

“In March.

Look up it’s far as fuck”

At 1:25pm the flights are booked. This is happening.

We start researching what we actually just signed up for. The “Switzerland of Asia” seems to be a beautifully mountainous country, far from what we know, far in general. 5000km far with a time difference of 5 hours. Rich in cultural heritage connected to shamanism and traditional crafts such as carpet felting. Definitely the most random decision we have made in a while. I don’t think I have ever even talked to anyone from Kyrgyzstan.

One day later I get another text from Felix.

“Yooo

Dune wants to come!

Omg they booked”

Another day passes and I find a new group chat in my chat history.

One more person, Paula, signed up for the unusual endeavor. I have never met her before. Curious. Very curious. About all of it.

Ever heard of geophagia? It's a term describing the practice of eating soil, such as clay.

So it turns out to be a common practice that people in Kyrgyzstan eat clay. Yepp. Eat it. Chunks of it. Just like that. I find images of market stands in Bishkek with varieties of gray, yellow and blueish clay bits, ready to be munched. I find a website called museumofedible.earth where the blue clay is described as following:

“One of the most delicious clays. It has a beautiful light gray color with yellow streaks on the surface of the piece. The clay is dense and homogeneous in structure. It bites off with a crunch, breaks down into plates and melts into a delicate creamy mass, practically without sticking. At the very beginning, there is a subtle sweetish aftertaste. This clay has a very rich clay taste. Nourishing.”

“They eat clay.”

Felix repeats several times over bottles of wine at his place a few days later.

“They EAT clay!”

Lakes to Forests, Forests to Lakes

Once upon a time five young nixies lived happily and in harmony in a lake. They spend their days dancing and singing, playing with the freckled frogs, taking care of their tadpoles. In winter they would make small blankets for the hibernating newts in the bushes and in spring awake them with a festive parade back into the lake.

They had spent hundreds of years living as such.

Slowly things began to change when the first humans settled around their lake, paddling in odd vessels, sitting by the small beaches, leaving behind bottles and more foreign objects. Sometimes the frogs would get stuck in them, keeping the nixies busy, trying to free them in the short time windows in which no human was watching.

Children would hunt the tadpoles, squeezing them between their little fingers and fishermen would aimlessly kill every fish caught with their rods, no matter how small. The water turned brown and finally began to dry out.

Not wanting to be seen they began hiding, being able to sing and dance only at nighttime when the lake became quiet again.

Furious the nixies wrote new songs, which would lure lost travelers into the dark ends of the lake, where they would drown.

One day they decided to leave their beloved friend, the lake behind.

In one last dance they thanked it for the home it has been and the beautiful time they have had together.

The usually calm nixies had became filled with anger, going from rivers to lakes, none of them as beautiful as the one they once called home. Luring more and more humans into death, creating storms and floods, leaving behind destroyed villages. Their songs becoming sadder and sadder, angrier and angrier.

So they traveled restlessly for more than a hundred years, their hearts hardening, when they realized how it had not just been them who had been forced to move.

In a land far, far away from the five nixies, a group of five witches lived in a luscious birch forest. Always asking their friends the trees for permission, they would take a branch here, a cup of sap there, a handful of leaves, never the first and never the last branch, drop of sap or hand of leaves was taken, From their harvest they created tools, remedies and the most tasteful cordial, which they would drink on special occasions.

On festive days as such, the birds, small blue tits, spotted woodpeckers and many more, would make their way down from the treetops to join the festive spirit and songs, all night long, until they were almost too tired for their morning concert.

But one day large roaring machines with small humans inside entered their beautiful forest and took down tree by tree, from the first one in their sight to the last, no permission asked.

The birds were the first ones to leave, and soon the witches followed, crying over their lost friend, the forest. In rage they hid in bushes, trying to find a new home. They became sadder and sadder, angrier and angrier, setting the villages on fire that were built from the trees that once were waving their leaves gently in the wind gusts.

So they traveled restlessly for more than a hundred years, their hearts hardening, when they realized how it had not just been them who had been forced to move.

One day the nixies, after a long day of traveling, were greeted by a beautiful sight, when leaving behind them a small birch forest. In front of them a sparkling turquoise lake, inhabited by crested newts and lively toads. They could hear a spotted woodpecker build a nest in the treetops above them. They had found it.This, they wanted to call their new home.

So they sat down by the lakeside and asked the newts, toads if they could and as they said yes, they stood up and asked the woodpecker if they could stay and he said yes. He told them how once this place had been a luscious birch forest, inhabited by five witches that had been his great-great-great grandfather's friends. But then the humans had started to take all the trees away to build houses and then they had come back to take away the soil, clay, which they would turn into bricks, as their wood houses kept burning down. Once they had taken all the clay they could they left the place behind and water filled the craters left.

At first the water had been uninhabitable, but eventually a group of humans came back and began planting new birch trees and caring for the lake, until the toads and newts could make it their home.

Feeling sorry for the witches' fate, as it had been so similar to theirs, the nixies decided to name the lake in their honor and they prayed that they had, just as they did today, also found a new home.

They took the clay and turned it into flutes and began writing new songs in honor of the witches, the lake they had to leave behind and the forest that had once been here. So they danced and sang, the tadpoles, newts and woodpeckers joined their joyous melodies and even the trees danced and the ripples on the surface of the water synched up to their songs.

Two Solar Punks

We are standing close to the check-in of the boulder gym with its view onto a depressing looking canal, on yet another gray, rainy day in this puddle of a town. My friend looks down on his phone, yet internally prepared to scramble up and down walls for hours. An odd sport attracting those that stuck in cities that kept their inner child alive and would most likely climb up and down trees and rocks if immersed in nature.

We grew up together in suburban Hamburg and decided to study in this small student town in the Netherlands, 3 1/2 hours West from home.

We are waiting for someone he has recently met. He will join us today. A blond man, boy,  in his early twenties, enters. He's wearing a snug fitting brown leather jacket with a fur collar. There is something arrogant about him. He smiles and my judgment immediately evaporates. I nervously drop my cards on the floor next to the counter. He helps me pick them up and we introduce ourselves.

He’s a good hugger.

Odd to think that a year of friendship later, these two will spend 3 years of their lives in a relationship with each other.

Odd to think about, now that we are not anymore.

We were quite the cliche hippie-esque couple. Long haired blondies. Idealists. Intensive travelers. Our relationship opening and closing. Vegetarian. And to top the hippie cliches- from white privileged households. I sometimes wonder if in this world our level of idealism has become a privilege too. But the contradictions were strong between our lifestyle and our values. We preached about sustainability as we flew to visit the Burning Man Festival in the middle of the South African desert.

The solutions to almost all global issues seemed oh-so-obvious to us; universal basic income, community housing, local produce…

He switched between utopian excitement- in which a group of us buy a small patch of land and live in the Italian mountains and live in a community; we would fantasise about building a cob house, grow micro-greens and mushrooms - and a dystopian anxiety, fearing that patriarchal capitalism would win after all and continue destroying nature and grow social devisions around us. I wonder if he'll ever get that little farm.

I wonder if he will ever have that little farm.

We unspokenly agreed to hold onto the string of hope that steadily feeds our strength to initiate mindful change instead of being overthrown by the waves of depressing stories all around us. He subscribed to a newsletter on positive news called Upside by the Guardian, studying environmental psychology and finally installing solar panels on the roofs of Den Haag.

I began centring my art around the topics of community, ecofeminism, mythology and the deepening of humans relationship with nature through understanding industrial production processes and their effects, and in contrast learn traditional crafts and raise appreciation for organic materials and slow, mindful production.

I naively try to keep the disease-esque pessimism that seams to be spreading globally out of the walls of my heart. I am a solar punk at heart.

We were solar punks at heart and I hope we always will be, even when apart.

Tidal Wave

I bathe in the resonating sound of the deep voice, unable to think clearly or respond.

I bathe in melodies, intoxicated and surrounded by alienated, yet oddly connected bodies.

I bathe my naked body in an icy stream, who directly made its way from the mountains, sharply cutting my breath.

I bathe in the giggles shared with friends, warming my body, allowing each other to make increasingly inappropriate jokes throughout the evening.

I bathe in your hug, wanting to request another one as soon as we let go of the embrace, my heart tingling.

Go with the waves of your emotions, many therapists have said.

Isn't life sometimes like an ocean dive, salt water cleansing your nose, in a painful, yet oddly satisfying way?

Lullabies

In her parents house one will often hear a humming or whistling melody, coming from the vocal cords of her father. Melodies, sometimes familiar, sometimes seemingly random.

The sisters had been observing this behavior with the assumptious conclusion that this is simply his way of relieving stress.

Now a new human has just entered the family, a little girl called Svea.

A dramatic scream for help, followed by rhythmic bouncing of the little body combined with a calming humming or lullaby, possibly for both sides to cope with the outburst of emotions has become an hourly ritual.

Recently on the phone, her mother stated: “if I wouldn't make music in these times, I think I would be an addict. I would be drinking, I would take drugs.” This woman has never touched drugs, except for alcohol and nicotine in her life. And even if she might be slightly over exaggerating, the point is made.

She ends the call, leaves her front door, takes her phone from her pocket, puts on a song, puts in her headphones and starts cycling, singing loudly for herself and whoever she passes on her way.

Lake Days

Growing up in the suburbs, the sisters had spend many summer days and winter dips taken at various lakes surrounding the area of their parents’ house.

Immersing their body in a body of water has been a reliable way to cleanse the mind and wash back into the present. Immersed in a comforting hug of liquid, taking their bodies to become part of the lake's own body of water.

On a warm summer day, the sisters left their childhood home early in the morning and drove to the closest lake to take images of the elder one of the two, as she was pregnant.

Watched and photographed the pregnant, naked sister, began washing her belly with the water they were once bathed in as toddlers. Puddles of water taken with her hands, forming a leaking bowl shape, before slowly letting the liquid run in a stream over her belly over and over again.

She began serenading her unborn child, while soothingly washing her belly and the child, itself floating in a body of water within her.

A stream of melodies, made up in the moment, flowing out of her like the river, filling this lake.

Hopeful she imagines a world in which she will teach her daughter a mindset of care and kindness.

Hopeful she imagines a world in which her daughter will be met herself with care and kindness, a world of safety and love like the one she was able to grow up in.

Maybe an even better world.

Clay head

Immersing my hands in the soft body of soil, I forget about the concept of time until my back painfully reminds me of the duration of my doing.

Immersing my hands in the soft body of soil, I forget the concept of time until my back painfully reminds me.

I repetitively stroke the material until the desired smoothness of the surface is achieved. I squish, I carve, add moisture, fold the clay into itself when bubbles arise in a technique that forms a shape reminding of a dear head.

Every artefact creating becoming an extension of myself, each recognisable as my creation, my hands unintentionally creating an intuitively similar style. An odd collaboration with the organic matter.

I started working with clay during the last year at the art academy. Making and failing plenty. Stubbornly anchored to the ceramics studio, hours on end.

This small room, almost hidden behind the cantine, had avoided my attention for the previous three years. Or maybe I had been avoiding the oddly unmotivated workshop instructor.

I had taken a turntable course in Barcelona, and I was impatiently waiting to return to my class in Gràcia, a lively neighborhood near the mountains. The class was led by the calm handed, attractive, tattooed teacher, Antonio. It started by watching him in the almost sensual act of centering a 500 gram piece of clay, a slurping soundscape while continuously changing its shape from a phallic tower to a flat blob.

“Un poco más!” Would be one of his typical comments in the next step of the process; trimming. Tapping on the shape I was working on, he was listening to the sound of the hollow body. Once the sound became drum-like, hollow, it was time to stop cutting down and leave the little creation to dry and wait for its next step.

Baking, glazing, baking, and after four weeks I could hold my first cups. Every piece would be  proudly gifted to family members for Christmas. Every excited reaction fed my confidence and compelled me to continue making aimlessly. Every piece was gifted – but one.

This one cup had accidentally slid down the wheel, twirled around and dented. A beautifully accidental, asymmetrical mishap.

Glaze stuck to the kiln, twenty mouldy, non-waterproof cups, completely melted pieces that I accidentally put in the kiln at the wrong temperature. Many more beautiful mistakes would follow. Many explainable, many frustrating, but each full of lessons.

More cups, vases, plates, swords, crowns, and most recently instruments became part of my proud collection of ceramic creations. I hardly want to use a mass produced ceramic object anymore, knowing the bliss I feel when holding one made with my, my friends or my sisters hands.

The workshop lures me, every time I pass by.

A playground where knowledge exchange between playmates is the norm, collectively understanding the medium in greater detail with each playtime. Running into fellow enthusiasts, I can expect a geeky conversation on a new experiment revealed to me with glowing, child-like, excited eyes.

This is not a self-centered showing off. It emerges from that excited playfulness, and the knowledge that I will share that excitment and exchange my toys: rock powder, ashes, found clay. The material teaches us and we teach each other.

It’s an odd combination: productivity and procrastination – not knowing why I’m bringing artefacts into a world that doesn’t need any of them.

Beyond functionality and utility I find what could be the centre of most artistry. The aimless act of creation, play, suspending time to connect the artist to the present and intuition. A safe space of self expression and beauty.

Mermaids

They hadn't been together for a few months, but couldn't let go of what they had lost, with a hope and confusion that it might not be over.

They plan a night on the beach on a late summer evening, stopping at a gas station to buy wood for a fire.

He had the tendency to misjudge directions and distances and she,  trying to not fall back into bickering, retained her joking tone while they walked in circles with their heavy bags through a small forest to the dunes.

It took longer than he expected to start the fire. The ripped-out pages of her notebook helped.

The fire was still burning when they ran into the cold sea, luminescent algae glowing up shyly around them. “It was so much stronger two days ago”, he said.

She had only seen luminescent algae once, but would have never expected it in this usually quite, unexciting country. She takes another slow dive through the little sparks of light and starts whirling her hand around the water, almost as if trying to whip it like egg white for a meringue.

They spend the evening side by side by the fire, eating the risotto he cooked the day before and exchanging music they have been listening to since the break up. They're phones connected to the speaker she plays an upbeat album by the band Jungle that had been the soundtrack of many of her summer days. Bouncing around the fire, wrapped in a blanket the ocean adds to the soundtrack of the night roaring calmly in the back.

It started raining, so they decide to go home instead of sleeping in the dunes, as they had planned.

When they come home she grabs the guitar, and starts singing along to the sound of the strings. “I love when you sing”, he said, rolled up on the couch next to her.

Bibliography

Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2015.

In the intersection between science and indigenous knowledge, Kimmerer shares personal experiences and revelations, teaching a new appreciation towards nature's gifts. Especially her ideas of “honorable harvesting methods” were very intriguing to me.

Coelho, Paulo. Hippie. Hamish Hamilton, 2018.

Generally one of my favorite authors, Coelho’s book Hippies is his most autobiographical one so far. It tells about him and his lover Karla’s journey to Nepal in a bus from Dam Square, Amsterdam. A book that speaks of journeys, young love and the values and lifestyle related to the term hippie.

I also see the writing style of this book as something I can draw inspiration from for my thesis.

Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Namaste Publishing, 1997.

Stepping away from a mind centered definition of self, Tolle’ teaching of mindfulness focus on, well, being present in the now, while consciously choosing when to think in future and past terms. He addresses the mind and it’s “tricks”, with which it distracts us from being present.

Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha S. Fischer Verlag, 1922.

Hesse describes the spiritual journey of the young Siddhartha. Initially seeing strength in the ability to fast and live an ascetic life, the young man embarks on a journey that confronts him with many challenges, makes him dive into the world of materialism, which he sees as a game and turns away from.

Finally he finds wisdom and calm in a river. Here he becomes a ferryman, known for his enlightened being.

Ende, Michael. Momo. Thienemann Verlag, 1973.

A book that my father read to me when I was a child and that my dance school reenacted on stage. Only now I fully understand the value of it. Momo is an orphan child living in an abandoned theater. Her character strikes with strong listening skills and her humble nature.

“Gray men” enter the small town that she lives in and start stealing people's time, it becomes a new currency that has to be saved and put in a savings account.

Visualizing a human's time in so-called hour-lilies, the book gives a poetically rich analysis of how humans do not value time, which is not spent “productively”.

Artistic References

Ragnar Kjartansson - Death is Elsewhere

A film installation in which two sets of twins move around screens set up in a circle, singing a song called Death is Elsewhere for 77 minutes at summer solstice.

"I keep thinking of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and these magical nights of love. We're having a lovely time in nature; the horror of the world seems elsewhere. But midsummer is also a reminder of death, or darkness. That's the psyche of the Arctic regions. It's getting brighter and brighter, but the light is already starting to fade into blessed darkness."-Ragnar Kjartansson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdqSGBjTRk

Mel Arsenault - Altars

The Canadian artist Mel Arsenault is also playing on the intersection of science and spirituality, often creating altars and embracing her collaboration with the elements, the pigments in her work, interacting with the fire to become something out of her control.

https://melarsenault.com/Le-Jardin-des-AstrocytesII

Vica Pacheco

Ceramic instruments and installations

https://peana.co/artists/75-vica-pacheco/overview/