Krev není voda / Blood is not Water ∞ritual∞
An opening ritual to initiate the Uroboros 2023 festival
“(…) in fact, it is possible that we are here and now, at least three billion years old, and already becoming something else”
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2 Nov Thu 20:00 CEST
What we now regard as the unyielding matter was originally celestial chaos, a soft and malleable substance, a hylæ, which the imagination of an uncorrupted human being could mold into any form it wished. All the real acts of this alchemical process remain invisible. There is a perichoresis, an interpenetration. In fact, it is possible that we are here and now, at least three billion years old, and already becoming something else.
It is a matter of going in, going inside, and – paradoxically – finding oneself outside or “on the convex side” of the ninth Sphere, “behind the mountain of the Qáf”.
In principle, it is about the relation of the outside, the visible, exoteric (Greek: τὰ ἔξω; Arabic: záhir), and the inside, the invisible, esoteric (Greek: τὰ ἔσω; Arabic: bátin). It is about the relation between the natural and the spiritual world.
To come out of ‘the where’, the category of ubi, is to leave the outer, natural appearance of things that envelope the hidden inner reality, like an almond hidden in a shell.
This is a step into the Unknown, towards the Gnostic, a return to the self. Or at least a movement towards that return.
Obviously, once we cross this boundary, the question of “where” loses its meaning, at least the meaning with which it is endowed in the universe of our sensory experience (Henry Corbin, Mundus Imaginalis).
Connected events:
Darina Alster & Jan Matýsek
Darina Alster is an intermedia artist, performer and techno-wizard. She works with new forms of performance with staged elements, costumes and site specific situational scenography. The themes of the performances range from personal mystical-bodily experiences of temporality and powerful emotions to highly engaged commentaries on globally shared aspects of contemporary world, often silenced or tabooed. She works with the tension between apparent rationality of contemporary technologies and the irrationality of archaic media such as astrology and tarot, myths and fairy tales, and other kinds of religious and secular archetypes. Often she deals with archives of personal and social and institutional memory or the memory of specific place, which she perceives in personal and political contexts. She addresses social themes through personal bodily experience, which, when grasped as a generational testimony, takes on social and critical overlaps. The personal thus becomes political. Since 2016, she cares of the Mothers Artlovers collective, and since 2019, together with Kateřina Olivová, she has been the head of the New Media Studio 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Jan Matýsek (1994) is a visual artist and set designer. He creates his own stories and myths from external and internal sensations and explains the phenomena between heaven and earth through their associations and causality. He combines the themes of transhumanism, ecofeminism and corporeality with the psychotherapeutic means of hypnosis and incantation. He creates mostly videos with an emphasis on the imagery of the unconscious. He sets the videos in video installations - imaginal, ritual spaces and through direct communication with the audience he mediates their transformation or transcendence on an inner level. He is inspired by shamanic practices of initiation, initiation and awareness of the hidden. He has studied at the feminist New Media Studio 2 at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the studio of scenography at the JAMU in Brno and an internship at the experimental film studio at the UdK in Berlin. He worked as a curator at Umakart gallery in Brno. Since February 2023 he has been working as an assistant professor at the New Media 2 studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.