Federica Matta: THE GODDESSES TEMPLE, drawings mounted on card, installation
Based on her drawings for the goddess books of THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES‘ NETWORK (Verlag für Moderne Kunst Vienna), Federica Matta has developed a fantastical temple of the goddesses including figures, a Neolithic longhouse, animals, ceramics and mythical creatures. The imaginary realm of the goddesses that emerges is a paradise that we can roam.
Photo: Heide Schimke
Elisabeth von Samsonow: THE ELDER POEM. Drawings and film stills 2021
In her project “The Elder Poem”, Elisabeth von Samsonow investigates and stages convergences between art and ecology, creating a poetology of botanical systems. Starting from the Old Irish alphabet of trees, Beth-Luis-Nion, as explored by Robert von Ranke-Graves in his voluminous influential book “The White Goddess”, she maps the “Land of the Goddesses”, which was founded in 2020 by a group of artists and supporters in Lower Austria, and its surroundings. This Land of the Goddesses is a biodiverse habitat of vineyards, acacia forests, fields and scrubland. Expanding the zone of transhumanist communication at a threshold level, her project aims to establish gestures of attention and mutual recognition between humans and non-humans. What if the alphabet had actually been invented by trees? Using a system that creates associations between letter, tree, place, property, historical and mystical narrative strands (as is the case with the alphabet of trees), when we wander across this landscape or specific biotopic habitat, the simple walk becomes a journey to the centre of the imagination and results in a poem written by the territory itself. The condition of this kind of eco-poem is a non-targeted approach between the people and the land, a playful gesture in an environment that was once – as the surrounding areas still are – dominated by heavy industrial agriculture, energy production and capitalisation of various kinds.
Photo: Heide Schimke