Phlegethon-Miczenie, 2005 Still from video. Limited edition DVD, 14 minutes, color, sound. Installation and performance: Books, drawings, crayons, pencils, artist's body, projected video, sound. Photo: Stefan Gloede. Courtesy Inter-Galerie, Potsdam (Berlin).
Phlegethon-Miczenie, Inter-Galerie, Potsdam (Berlin), March 4 - April 10, 2005
"Phlegethon (River of Fire) is the river that flows with fire which burns and does not consume" (Virgil VI, 265, 551). It is one of the five rivers in the realms of Hades. In Polish "milczenie" means "silence," "muteness" connoting the lack of sound but also the inability to speak or convey.
Phlegethon-Miczenie installation incorporates performative sculpture, video, and sound in two galleries. In one space, ("Milczenie"), most of the floor is covered with old books and gradually accumulated drawings. The books are open and placed in several rows and layers forming an elongated octagon. All books were published in Germany before the Second World War and are classical German literature and philosophy. The drawings represent naked and solitery human figures, mostly female, and were made by the artist with pencil and crayon on pages torn from old notebooks and from the books in the installation. Throughout the exhibition over long periods of time, the artist crawls onto the paper material and draws around her body with black charcoal sticks. Visitors are invited to join her in "Milczenie" space, where they are required to remain silent, and where they can read the books. The sculpture gradually changes, and the process is documented by a video camera suspended from the ceiling. "Phlegethon," a video and sound installation in the other gallery is composed of the footage from the live performance overlapping with the view of burning books. The artist composed the sound from the crackling of burning fire which overlaps with the voices of German speakers reading fragments of poems by Paul Celan. This musical composition culminates with a male soprano vocalist Anthony Roth Costanzo singing altered fragments of the Joseph Haydn's "The Creation" and Pergolesi's "Salve Regina," which the artist recorded, altered and multiplied, creating a chorus of twelve voices.
