In his „Metamorphoses“ (8 AD) Ovid has written down the myth of Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha. The spoken words of this sound installation follows Gustav Schwab’s interpretation of Ovid’s text in Schwab’s canonic book: „Die schönsten Sagen des klassischen Altertums“ (1838).

DEUCALION: As far as I can see through all the surrounding country, I can discover no living creature.
We are the last.

PYRRHA: We two must people the earth; all the rest have been drowned by the flood.

D: But even we are not yet certain of our lives.
Every cloud that I see strikes terror to my soul.
And even if danger is past, what shall we do alone on the forsaken earth? Oh, that my father Prometheus had taught me the art of creating men and breathing life into them!

D & P: Tell us, by what means we can replace the people that have disappeared? Oh, help the earth to new life.

ORACLE: Leave my altar.
Uncover your heads, take of your clothes
and cast the bones of your mother behind you.

P: Pardon me, I do not obey you and I cannot consent to scatter the bones of my mother.

D: To scatter the bones of my mother.
My reason deceives me.
Or the command of the goddess is good and involves no impiety.

P: The great mother of all of us is the Earth; her bones are the stones, and these, we will cast behind us!”

O: Thereupon they uncovered their heads, ungirded their garments and began casting stones behind them.
The stones began to lose their hardness, became malleable, grew and took form — Whatever was moist or earthy in the stones was changed into flesh; The harder parts became bones.
The veins in the rock remained as veins in the bodies.