Crystal, crystal, tell me what you see
Wide entrance through to grace
Thou shall not crumble, perish, or flee
On the altar, mine is thy face.
Upon thy skin, I etched my name
Keep my language, set me free
Take my sacrifice in plea
for a shield in outer space.
100000 years ago, by the time when our hours were spent hunting and gathering, we went on long journeys far away from home. We tasted different waters and sometimes, we found different-looking stones. The stoic rocky flowers that kept the sun inside pierced out like obelisk monuments. Perhaps some of us saw ourselves on their reflective surface, while others changed the colour of our eyes when looking through them. We brought them home, kept them together and decorated our tombs. We collected and imbued them with magic, each with a different spirit, and in return, they ornated, brushed and cured us.
A million years old in wisdom, the stones could speak. And to those who are learned in their language, to those who can listen, they tell stories about our Earth. They teach the dance of the ground. Some were the last bits of magma to cool down after the eruption of a neighbouring volcano, now disguised as a mountain. They tell us about their travels and how much pressure and heat they had to endure. How their atoms bind together in perfect geometry, how everything else suffocated in overbearing oxygen. How some of them lived underwater, and how the water slowly left. In ocean time though, it was like a puddle evaporating under the Sun after a storm.
Upon our touch, they each became whole. And so did we, when we sent them back with our dead, when they passed on stories, when we carved out talismans and brought them with us in war. When we lay them on our foreheads in meditation, when we saw through them the face of our lovers, when we kept them on our pharmacy shelves5. We gathered crumbs in orderly classification, solitary fragments departed from source, self-assured of their alchemical ancestry, brought together in kinship, with each other, and with us.
Seminar zellSAMMLUNG - Winter Semester 23/24
Prof. Sybil Kohl, Supervised by Dipl. Jochen Fischer, Dipl. Gala Adam
IDG - Institut für Darstellen und Gestalten
University of Stuttgart