‘ Aligning worlds’ is a multimedia installation that explores the role of rituals within the creative process and their potential to foster new relations and generate knowledge unattached to preconceived modes of thinking. The project started with the formation of the artistic collective `Vital Circle‘ ( Bregje Horste, Annie Riga, Sofia Magdits and Karla Paredes). We investigate ritual as ‘a laboratory of relations’, similarly to how anthropologist Tim Ingold describes rituals as sequences of material actions that produce ‘environmental relations of intimacy’ between different human and non-human elements and agents.

Three members of our collective had the opportunity to collaborate under these ideas at DOOR (Dordrecht) under the realisation of the group project “The Raw Cases” with colleagues from their previous Master studies at St. Joost School of Art. 

Through this three-day project, the three artists intended to create a space where the visitor can surrender to the experience of sensing by freely navigating themselves through the surrounding space and physically engaging with the materials provided (clay, pigment). The viewer is invited to enter through, kneel, walk around and touch/make, thus initiating a bodily commitment and a range of multiple perspectives with the work. Through this, they aimed to make visible the inherent human need to render in material responses to the world, the compulsion to make art and its imperative social value to our being. 

The artists worked under the idea of layers or stages that made up the installation.

The crater

A crater is a depression on a surface, mostly formed by an impact of a meteorite, volcanic activity, or an explosion. This means a sudden change on something that it “was” until that moment, coexisting with the start of something new. For this project I choose to build this crater with clay since this material is the oldest known ceramic material and is the most common sedimentary rock in soil, but also because of its generous and malleable characteristics. Therefore everyone can easily work and play with it. Water is also a primal element that was needed to maintain the clay wet so the material could be accessible for everyone to work at any time. Both clay and water symbolized ancient origins that are connected with the primitive human compulsion to create art which indicates that the making of art has a social purpose imperative to our beings and therefore it can be also seen as a ritualistic practice. Under this thoughts I invite the visitors to an actively participation, changing the raw state of the initial form around the crater and using four different pigments. The visitors could choose freely what form to shape or what color to use. The circular form of the crater invites the visitor to walk around it as well as providing the opportunity to look at it from different angles. Its position on the floor welcomes the visitor to kneel and get a better contact with the clay, causing a longer permanence which calls to a concentrated frame to work. During the open days the initial work unörglige a constant transformation made by the participants, but also by myself. For example at the first day of the exhibition leaves were placed around the crater, which eventually had to be removed because they interfered the interaction between the clay and the visitor. In addition to the crater I inserted two different sculptures that I made before, out of clay and watercolors. Randomly done, these sculptures took their form out of the process of playing with the material. One of the sculptures was hanging from the ceiling just above the center of the crater. This sculpture symbolized a timeless position, a starting point in where possibilities are still not thought. The other sculpture laid on the floor and at its background the projection of a video loop (50 sek.) called “cloudy spells” could be seen.

Cloudy spells

Is a short collection of mixed images from the sky of Door during our residency, but also images from our visit into the exhibition of Adelbert Cuyp at Dordrecht Museum. These images contain close ups from clouds  at the sky changing constantly, reflecting on a borderless state between what I saw in the sky at door and what other artist saw.E.g:Cuyp, Constable and Turner. Both the sculpture and the video fuse the feeling between what is and was and what it could be.