A WORLD ON THE END OF A REED

Áron Birtalan

Events:
The Abyss Between Our Hands & ŠUM#21 launch
11 April, 17:00, MGLC Ljubljana

12 April / Workshop: Mysticism and Touch praxis session
17–18 August, public workshop (details TBA)

Residency project: Taking notes from mystical theology, ecology, and romantic love songs, this project explores how languages of intimacy erase and birth bodies and relationships. A World on the End of a Reed treats intimate relationships between human and nonhuman bodies as sentient entities of their own – a third voice that blooms to utterance or collapses to silence when two bodies touch. How can such a third voice be heard, felt, communed with? And what if it remains forever silent?

The project adapts Birtalan’s earlier guided experience in conversation with a heretical religious movement from the Middle Ages called The Heresy of Free Spirit. Birtalan is interested in how the Free Spirit heresy’s tenants and language address the ecstatic as a quantum leap that renders the body permeable. Here, ecstasy becomes a midwife to an encounter with a world enfleshed, and with a relationship that knows something about us we ourselves never will. Communing with a silent uncertainty towards this relationship is what Birtalan hopes to call “trust” or “faith”.