09 Nov - 10 Feb 19
SLEIPNIR
interactive installation with 8 performers
wood, metal, steel bearings, electromagnets, sound
Music: Pedro Gómez-Egaña
Text: Pedro Gómez-Egaña with fragments from
The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges
In the Footsteps of Adam by Thor Heyerdahl
Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson
A head without a body
It can see every place in the world, from every possible angle.
Your ancestors found it. They kept it, they cared for it, and now it is yours. You have inherited it. You hold it, you keep it on your lap, and it speaks to you. You listen to it closely as it tells you what it sees.
I see the teeming sea; I see daybreak and nightfall; I see the multitudes of America; I see a silvery cobweb in the centre of a black pyramid; I see a splintered labyrinth; I see unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I see a head without a body.
I see bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam, oil, emeralds. I see convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I see a man; I see his brushed hair, his tall figure, I see the cancer in his brain; I see a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I see a sunset over the river Araxes that reflects the colour of a rock in Tihuanaco; I see horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I see scorpions.
I see the delicate bone structure of a hand; I see the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I see tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies; I see all the ants on the planet; I see a Persian astrolabe; I see a monument; I see the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been my body; I see the circulation of my own dark blood.
I see my father speaking to my mother: I will build you the house of your dreams in an island, he says. He doesn't realise it but the island is full of scorpions. I see my mother in the house at night, awake, killing every shadow in case it's alive. It often is. I see scorpions, she says. Even when they're not there. I see them climbing my bed. I see them crawling at night. Your father doesn't mind because he can travel in an instant to distant lands. The whole world is just one ocean, he says. The whole world is just one ocean. But not for me. This house is my ocean, and tonight is my ship.
*Performance will take place every 15 minutes.