Currents And Orders

In the early history of humankind, caves served as places of worship. They were seen as portals to other worlds, sites of origin and transformation. Currents And Orders reactivates myth, staging a magical ritual in a cavernous world of stone formed over geological millennia. The hypnotic power of Zwirchmayr's analog images combine with mesmerizing sound, song, and the cryptically evocative movements of a trio of women.

Flashes of light, glowing colors, damp, karstified textures of ancient rock formations, perspectival through-lines, ascend and descend: Antoinette Zwirchmayr creates a stage out of the cavernous architecture, using its passages, crevices, and chambers, to tap into associations with the interior of the human body. Teresa Rotschopf sings, “I constantly change,” in a hauntingly siren-like voice: Is it the stone world that is speaking?

Zwirchmayr's cave mass reactivates an iconography of the occult, employing magic circles, robes, masks, rotating torches, and a full moon seen in the pitch-black night. The cave dwellers are dressed in lobster-colored robes reminiscent of high priestesses. Their dance seems to follow a higher order in communication with a non-human world. Gestures evoke the blossoming of a bud and the flapping of a bat's wings. When the figures appear to be spatially arranged like organ pipes in the cave, the formation of stalactites over the course of ages comes to mind.

Currents And Orders brings Plato's allegory of the cave to mind, as well as the “magick” of underground cinematic sorcerer Kenneth Anger – but here the spell that is cast has nothing to do with the demonic. Currents and Orders is a cinematic mantra about the infinity of metamorphosis, sensitive and engaging at the same time. (Esther Buss)

Translation: Eve Heller