POISON ORACLE

Passages through the skin (Excerpts)

Poison Oracle
Limited edition of 25 extendable books
Silkscreen-printed by Le 7e Oeil
http://7e-oeil.tumblr.com/
Size 56x17cm | 15 double-sided pages | 3 colors | rugged hardcover
270cm long unfolded
Published with the support of Focuna, the National Cultural Fund, Luxembourg
2019

April 5th 2019
Book presentation
La Pugiliste Noire.
Willem Dreespark 312
Den Haag The Netherlands
Curator: Ibrahim Ineke

AWAY FROM THAT LINE / IN TOWARD THE EARTH
10 December 2018
Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre, Paris, France
Hosted by Mission culturelle du Luxembourg en France

OPEN ARE ALL ARTERIES BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE HEART
3 February 2018
Trois C-L, Centre de Création Choréographique Luxembourgeois
Luxembourg

A sabbatic dance performance, haunting live music and an encompassing art installation collapse into a single, mesmerizing event; a night lighted in primal red.

Alkistis Dimech: Passages through the skin

Dancing fantasmata into flesh, the choreographer and artists explore the interaction of fantasm (image/ghost) with matter in the moving body; the communication that arises through these interactions between insides and outsides, viscera and skin, memory and presence, and the mediums that bind them: sound, light, breath.

Angelo Mangini & Kevin Muhlen: Away from that line, In toward the earth

Music as a vibrational force, an abstract sorcery, unbound and forever moving between immediate and future experience; sonic lifeforms, both physical and spectral, affect and contaminate with an intensity that converts the human body into a space for resonance.

Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert: Poison Oracle

Painting and video installation on metamorphosis and the black art of poisoning; a meditation on the creative-destructive process of personal and suprapersonal change; a poiesis of violation, infection and elemental disturbance.

* The installation includes The Host, a piece produced in association with artist and costume designer Katie Pollard who also created the dress for Alkistis’ performance.

The choreography evolved from the Night at BPS22 in Charleroi; I sought through the dance to evoke a descendant of ‘the sorceress’ who manifested in the earlier work. Projections of that performance on the walls at 3C-L made visible the fantasm of the sorceress as a spectral presence, the past cut into and looming over the performance.

With Passages through the skin I took inspiration from the munabbiâtu – a female diviner by ghosts, or necromancer – who is the focus of the oracle or curse of Ezekiel 13:17–22: ‘Woe to those who sew fetters on all wrists and make shawls for heads of every height, in order to hunt souls. Will you hunt the souls of my people, and make your souls live? You have profaned me to my people for handfuls of barley and pieces of bread, making die souls that should not die, and making live souls that should not live, while you lie to my people, you who listen to lies. Therefore thus says the Lord Yahweh: I will go up against your fetters with which you hunt the souls like birds, and I will tear them from your arms and shoo away the souls that you hunt, the souls like birds. I will tear off your shawls and snatch my people from your hand, and they will no longer be prey in your hands, […] you will no longer see empty visions and practice divination.’ The figure of the munabbiâtu was a threat to male priestly control; translated into English as ‘witch’ or ‘false prophetess,’ her practice was delegitimised and has only been reconsidered in the light of feminist biblical scholarship.

Alkistis Dimech on performing Passages through the skin, in Luxembourg.