I live and work as an artist in the fields of performing arts, video, photography, music theater, and ritual art. Being queer and with my background of dreams and practice in theater, classical music, and opera, I find myself increasingly wondering: how can this Western, this European culture, which holds itself in such high esteem, bring the entire planet's nature to the brink of collapse and spread a state of melancholy, depression, and dissociation around the whole globe? Therefore, I now find myself exploring rituals as an art form in which art, activism, somatics, healing, transformation, and genuine connection can come together.
I trace my fascination with ritual back to my own experience of growing up with a lack of ritual, which equates to a lack of connection to oneself, the people around, nature, and higher meaning. Very early in my life i survived a period of life-threatening sickness due to a then unidentified autoimmune-disease, which, as a trauma-consequence left me for life with a big lack of somatic integrity.
As a means of survival, I kept searching for what was lost for me and discovered, after a lifelong wandering, that the culture surrounding me was, on a normalized level, lacking something very similar: Melancholy, the European disease of losing a sense of life, evolved for complex reasons, dating back to the times when common ritual culture began to be swamped out and replaced more and more by so-called high-culture: christian liturgy, theater, fine art, ballet, and opera. I see art not just as a means to survive this culture, but to resolve it.
In my work, I share my findings in the form of ritual workshops, involve myself as a performer, create photography and video art, and look for ways to practically connect these mediums with ritual. By doing so, I enable their transformative potential, which I believe art should have, to expand beyond aesthetics and entertainment, towards experience and efficacy.
I speak from within the European-Western culture, white culture, which i see as a result of historic trauma, necessary to confront and resolve. It is essential to me to acknowledge and mourn the loss that European culture induced upon itself for millennia.
Western European nations spread the same violence they caused to themselves on an even larger scale over other innocent cultures worldwide through colonial processes and human supremacism. To move towards any restoration, healing, and reconciliation, I believe that recovering a capacity for self-connection, for example, with the help of art and ritual, is a necessary step.
To mourn gives value to what was once lost and creates space and capacity to find vitality again. Ritual gives form and space to mourn, and art gives a vessel and inspiration for ritual; connection to oneself and vitality are needed to genuinely connect also with those affected by our actions; to grow capacity for assuming accountability and responsibility for our legacy of violence and domination, and face the challenges of our time.
Through my work i want to contribute to interrupt the perpetuation of patterns of trauma that lie within and spread from our, the western, the european culture.
