The two-year investigation aims to achieve a higher sensibility towards socio-political conditions, interpersonal and intrapersonal connections, and the act of becoming fearless while remaining soft and permeable. The work is a container, encyclopedia, or archive for the excavation of ancient therapies, the queering of contemporary ones, a re-appropriating, a remixing, and a reformulating of therapies in order to care, to share, to disconnect. This expansive investigation includes intimate artist-to-artist overnight sessions in the Botanic Garden VU Amsterdam, a Useless Artist Disease , meditations for Wolfgang Schäuble, the master key to De Appel Arts Centre, a hacked heart-break, and a personal narrative about a journey into the world of healing.
Vera Hofmann
www.verahofmann.de
info@verahofmann.de
Vera Hofmann is an innocent child, a displaced teenager, a Triple A advertising account manager, a satisfactory commission photographer, a long-time mourner, an underground techno DJ, a global native, a digital immigrant, a disobedient activist, a patient client, a hypercritic, a wounded healer, a cover polar bear, a useless artist and a dedicated lover who received a highly-acclaimed trauma from the MA in Fine Arts ‘Cure Master’ program at Sandberg Institute Amsterdam.
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THE SHEPHERDESS
#Chryptochromatic Jetlag #Hortus Botanicus VU Amsterdam #psychoactive plant healing session
experimental documentary HD video, 40 minutes, sound with Ruchama Noorda
The Shepherdess is the Mazatec name for the psychoactive plant Salvia Divinorum (Sage of the Ghosts) used by indigenous curanderas (shamans) in traditional healing ceremonies. The video combines footage of the artists vigil encounter with the Shepherdess during an overnight stay in the Hortus Botanics VU (the Botanical Garden of the Free University) Amsterdam in May 2015 with a virtual renderings in Second Life (“the largest – ever 3D virtual world created entirely by its users” according to the official site secondlife.com) and online chat conversations of the artists before and after their encounter. The session with the Salvia plant combines direct human-plant communication with Second Life therapeutic digital healing. The journey narrated involves travels back and forth across species, through multiple time layers, unevenly realized digital landscapes, outer and inner space, from analogue to digital, from ocean bed to childhood swimming pool to (cardboard) kidney dish. For the Shepherdess all scales are equal, all surfaces permeable, all material transmutable. Because I can swim in the immense Because I can swim in all forms …………………………………………….. I am the shepherdess (Maria Sabína, Mazatec curandera)
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