VISION QUEST
the BOOK
In Summer 2021 I was teaching at HGB School of Fine Arts Leipzig for p o s t documenta. The Seminar took place in the forest. (see article below)
I published a book related to the seminar, which contains the main themes I was teaching and experiencing with the students.
“The forest with its strange effects lies outside the inhabited precincts of consciousness. Many spiritual and psychological journeys begin with entering the “Dark Forest” of the psychic wilderness. A peculiar radiance emanates from the forest; one ventures into the forest as if into a daydream and loses one’s orientation until disappearing, encountering one’s own shadow demons. The forest is a place of solitude, healing and regression, sublimity and isolation, uninfluenced growth and continued decay.”
Vision Quest is one of humanity’s oldest rituals, a time of purification and a time in the wilderness. A rite of passage at the threshold between stages of life, an inner dialogue during periods of irritation, realignment, crisis and change. Following this, I understand this seminar as a free possibility / thought for initiation as a young artist, and this ritual will be developed, thought out, felt, led, lived, loved, rejected or destroyed by yourself, something new will be developed out of it or vice versa.
What I present here in this related essay are, in my eyes, themes of elementary artistic skills and practical suggestions for experience, always shaped by shamanic and psychological digressions. The forest is our setting to encounter the unconscious, authentic and intuitive. Being 100% attentive to the process – not the presentability, lies at the core of the work. All exercises are to be done in the forest.
The seminar can be seen as a school of experience and perception. The focus is on simply being, thinking with the hands. Be in a magic system; what is real, is fantastic.