“Mental border”

in the frame of ”En route – Art for Drivers” exhibition /
Spain – Germany – Poland, 2003 / art for drivers: http://www.kunstpflug.de/enroute

“Mental border” is a part of the “En Route” project in Germany. The main components of the “Mental border” work is a series of 14 cushions installed along a section of the road near Belzig. The concept was inspired by an old-Germanic seance of “seidr”, shamanistic in its nature:
During the seance a “Clairvoyant” or prophetess was sitting on a high podium on a cushion of chicken feather. She walked from house to house, sat on the cushion and foretold the people’s future, forecast the weather, predicted the quality of the crops, etc. (…) When in trance, the clairvoyant’s spirit left her body and travelled in space (…)
When driving, we often experience a trance or a kind of meditation mood. We yield to the travel’s monotony – the sound of the engine, the wind, etc. In our imagination we project future events or change the past ones. Today it has nothing to do with magic or clairvoyance. For some, such a departure from reality during a drive is a pleasant break, a pretext for reflection, for others it is a meaningless, tiring passage of time… What these two situations have in common is imagination, whose road is infinite, and the cushion. Once an element of the ceremony, now just an everyday object, on which to lay our heads and dream-travel… The project does not have a clearly predetermined objective here. Rather, it serves to provoke reflection, or, perhaps, questions: Is it only the visible that is the exclusive perception source of the reality? This is a question about us, about imagination and its ways.
It should be noted here that the above-described occult seance used to be exercised “not without a sense of shame”. For this reason it became women’s speciality and was thought of as “inappropriate for men”…

technique: 14 cushions covered by plastic; straw; tripods from wood; dim: 180 cm x 100 cm; tripod’s high: 70 cm