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Cast Behind You The Bones of Your Mother, 2015

mixed media installation

GermanEnglish

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.

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.

Clemes von Wedemeyer, Cast Behind You The Bones of Your Mother 2015, Sound installation, 3D printed sand, light spots 7 min
Clemes von Wedemeyer, Cast Behind You The Bones of Your Mother 2015, Sound installation, 3D printed sand, light spots 7 min
Clemes von Wedemeyer, Cast Behind You The Bones of Your Mother 2015, Sound installation, 3D printed sand, light spots 7 min
Clemes von Wedemeyer, Cast Behind You The Bones of Your Mother 2015, Sound installation, 3D printed sand, light spots 7 min
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Clemens von Wedemeyer

Clemens von Wedemeyer, born in 1974 in Göttingen, Germany, currently lives and works in Berlin and holds a professorship for media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. The artist and filmmaker studied photography and media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and graduated as Meisterschüler of Astrid Klein in 2005. Clemens von Wedemeyer participated in group shows such as the 1st Moscow Biennale (2005), the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006), Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008) and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012). He had solo shows among others at MoMA PS1, New York, ARGOS Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, the Barbican Art Centre, London, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. “ESIOD 2015” premiered at the 66. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Berlinale) in 2016.

Most recently Wendemeyer´s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions such as Im Kontext der Sammlung: Clemens von Wendemeyer (Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz 2023) and BAKHMUT (Albertinum Dresden 2023).



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