Ocean
"We can write Atlantic on the Ocean. It only says so much about what is really there." *
Participants are invited to take their place within the scene of a ritual. To make themselves comfortable in the circular set-up of OCEAN. Three guides are moving to the sounds and rhythms of breath, while the live-soundtrack slowly transforms from intimacy and fragility to vastness. Alongside unfolding poetic gestures, sounds, and objects, OCEAN merges and honors familiar acts of reproductive labour and the sacred feminine on a horizontal plane. Honoring both is the condition for much needed affective, ecological and political change.
Feminine energy and intelligence has been systematically suppressed for thousands of years. A key tool of patriarchal oppression is the mystification and suppression of the feminine. When we suppress the feminine, we also suppress something fundamental to all human existence. We allow separation and division to take over, we isolate the other - whether the other is human or not.
As a ritual, OCEAN sets the intention to overcome this division and to rehearse present connections. A ritual is a shared embodiment of intention that can assist to uncover and align the deepest values and meanings which people live by. OCEAN is a collective, experimental, spiritual moment - not as the affirmation or construction of a supernatural or religious belief system but as an earthly insisting on concrete relations to the material, visible and tangible value of reproducing our lives sustainably in a more-than-human-world.
We have forgotten that blood is sea water. All land life does not simply represent life from the sea but forms another type of sea itself, a terrestrial sea connected by all tissue, sap and lymph that constitute it **. Even though matter may travel and separate, it is always linked energetically.
OCEAN invokes that we are much more resourceful and connected than we allow ourselves to be.
* from a love letter received, 2014 ** from Sadie Plant Zeros and Ones, 1998
Ocean is a system powered by Daniela Bershan in collaboration with Deborah Birch, Sara Leghissa, Sabrina Seifried
Textiles and Textures: Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried
Set and Objects: Daniela Bershan
Energy Coaching: Fiona James