Unity Within Shadows
August, 2023
The workshop created during Experimental Education Protocole course: The Temple of All Beings by Angelo Plessas, Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.
The course focused on the concept of the temple- we tried to redefine the term “temple” so that it could reach beyond its religious connotations and human limitations. Bearing in mind the shamanistic practices, which require establishing relationships with the whole world, I invited the participants to search for unity with the environment around them through shadows. By exploring the possibility of connections and creations when the physicality is limited to the dark shape projected on the ground, they connect their shadows with the shadows of the physical elements around to create their own temple, signs, symbols, and new meanings.
Traditionally set hierarchy of beings assumes that the less common we have with a certain nonhuman realm the lower it is situated. At the same time, a human who is positioned at its top exercises the right to decide about life or death, protecting or destroying. Both natural science and well-developed empathy provides us with countless arguments against such an understanding of the world. To create the temple, where sufficient space will be available for all beings, we need to reject hierarchical structures and search for common ground between all physical elements. My consideration leads me to the idea of shadow understood as an egalitarian connector among all material elements. Moreover, its vulnerability to the atmospheric condition allows for setting an uneven bond with the immaterial world.
Photo credit: Anna Erber, Zahraa Khanafer, Merle Borgmann, Roza Pogosian.