Earth Shrine: Prayer Performance (Jasper Griepink and Victoria McKenzie)
As part of Jasper' Griepink’s solo show ‘Earth Shrine’ at MU Hybrid Arthouse, Eindhoven, Prayer Performance was a collective performance between two Diva-Priestesses on the re-sacralization of soil. Moving outside of neoliberal technologies which sees soil solely as a space of techno-agricultural productivity, the performance asked ‘what does it mean to create new relationship with soil and all of its more-than-human participants?’ Within the lineage of eco-feminism, can soil be understood as more than just the top layer of the Earth and instead a “multi-dimensional, multi-temporal, multi species space”? What is the relationship between the resting and restoration of the Earth and the resting and restoration of our bodies?
In the performance, the Diva-priestesses utilised prayer as a form of gathering community (participant-audience) through words, sound, movement and soil, giving life to that which nurtures us. We gathered through the word and through sound where the ‘prayer’ became a creative, critical scripting of re-collection and gratitude—piecing the past as a means of creating healing and future worlding as a means of speaking life into the soil and seeding something sacred.
Through the word, the body was brought into action, as the community came together to activate soil and gift it forward in our Gucci prayer purses. The prayer-performance left resonances of how our words, feelings and intentions become powerful sacred tools in the creation of new worlds, in the creative power of soil.
Temple Talk: Is Soil Sacred
Temple Talk: Is Soil Sacred
Continuing the conversation on soil, community, the sacred—’Temple talk’ was an informal dialogue between Jasper Griepink and Victoria McKenzie where they engaged in a discussion on what it means to be an artist-activist and to understand or re-interpret the world as nature as opposed to nature as something separate to the world. In the words of Science eco-fiction goddess Ursula Le Guin, “the word for world is [still] a forest”.
Weaving and moving through their being and personal practices, the artists discuss how the personal, political and aesthetic align; how the speculative future of the soil demands a reinterpretation outside of techno-agricultural production and how a reawakening of the Earth’s connectivity is the recognition of all its relations—human, more-than-human and spirit.