Unearthing the Tale of the Forest

On September 7th, 2002, the ongoing project Lunar Performances* celebrates the new moon, and the arrival of a new lunar month with the show TORN TEXTBOOKS. This will be part of the closing event of the Waldkunst Exhibition.

The performances are based on 6,000-year-old biblical narratives. They are then fragmented and re-structured under an umbrella of contemporary stories, such as fairy-tales, newspaper-clippings and biographic writings.

TORN TEXTBOOKS specially created for the Waldkunst Exhibition explores the multi-layered textuality of the German Forest. Narratives central to the German forest will be explored as a key myth to German identity, pointing to its powerful historical, cultural and folkloric signifiers. TORN TEXTBOOKS presents a fragmented form of speech that takes the form of a new myth sculpture. It emerges as a way to re-write the deepest sources of German Wald-signification. The goal is to create an opening for pluralistic narration's, multiple memories within different "sites' of naming and re-naming.

One of the intents of TORN TEXTBOOKS is to encourage audience participation The audience will be invited to take part in the creation of a spoken/written text-sculpture, inscribing themselves within a moment of reflexive memory. By locating themselves within the performance, we witness a "theater of becoming". Torn Textbooks celebrates impermanence through interweaving personal memories, while interrupting the cultural fabric of the past.

*Lunar Performances is a collaborative New York City based art-project that has exhibited in the USA and France over the last year. Created by Barbara Rose Haum, (an installation and performance artist) Lunar Performances explores the cycle of the lunar calendar in collaboration with film-maker Francois Boue and contemporary composer Daniel Schnyder

[The photographs below are Copyright: Horst Dieter Buerkle, Darmstadt.]