Lethe - Drawing Meadow (Stamford Project), 2005 Stills from video, color, sound, 11:37 minutes. Installation: Silk, graphite, pages from J.B. Bach's
"English Suites" in Polish edition, artist's body, children and adults from The Mead School in Stamford, Connecticut. Courtesy the artist.
Lethe - Drawing Meadow (Stamford Project), 2005
11:37 minutes, color, sound. Limited edition DVD
With music by J.S. Bach
Lethe in Greek means "River of Oblivion." Those who drank from Lethe were believed to loose the memory of their past existence.
Lethe - Drawing Meadow (Stamford Project) belongs to the series of installations entitled "Intervals," which are video works based on performances. The indoor and outdoor spaces become large scale drawings open
to contingency of the encounter with others who are invited to inhabit them together with the artist. In this series of works, the artist mounts a video camera above the scene of the action, usually from an elevated
viewpoint, allowing her to be both inside of the work and at the same time to document the process. Later, selected fragments of this footage become material for the final video work.
During five hours of the ephemeral installation "Lethe" installed at The Mead School in Stamford, Connecticut, the artist laid on the ground within the space of a large-scale white sheet of silk covering the ground.
Around her curled up body there were scattered pages from J.B. Bach English Suites, published in 1957 in Poland. The artist cut the pages out of the original music book, from which she used to practice piano, as a
child growing up in Poland. Now, scattered and dispersed throughout the drawing space, the pages acquired sculptural properties and were drawn upon by groups of children, who gradually joined the artist. She
continued drawing around her body, marking the surface of silk with graphite crayons. Some of the children lay on the ground and drew around their silhouettes in a similar way. The silk became gradually dark,
resembling earth, as the graphite lines covered it almost entirely. In her video piece which resulted from the performance Weiss included views of freshly ploughed earth which she filmed during her trip to Amsterdam.
