Occupied with ceremony, ritual, performance and art

I convinced Johannes to create a private performance exhibition for our wedding. We put seven installations in and around the Reichenstein Castle and I created a riddle as a guide to the installations and a meditation on the question “Love in Freedom or freedom in love? After the ceremony and feast – which were performances in the oldest sense of the word, we held a symposium to discuss our answers to the riddle.

I created a riddle as a guide to the installations

A riddle
in 7 parts

guided the guest in a spiral through the installations and up to the tower at the top of the castle.

The words for the riddle were taken  from excerpts from Poems for Johannes, a book of poems I made as a wedding gift. 

1. The Closet:

Each thinks he knows himself without the other, but I am the one who turns them inside out and makes them whole again.

2. The journey:

There is a part of me that wishes never to find my way home. I like the journey. It is my love for you and for the earth. And I know that the still dark night, without sense, will guide me home.

3. The study:

Yes, life is most awake in the burning desire to know, in the willful quest for Truth that submits to that which is greater.

4. The Threshold

5. Spielen:

A monkey sat in the open mouth of a great lion. Not wanting to be left alone, a second monkey joined the first and the two held one another until the lion closed its jaws and devoured them. I was the witness.

6. Flowers and Islands:

Even upon its approach, the island frees and heals the setting sun. We bear witness to the journey as we are ferried to the other side

7. The Holy of Holies:

From contracted infinity,
even the spiral itself
is the point becoming
line, becoming.
Truth becomes
more illusive
and yet more real
than the intellect allows.
Because only
the thinking heart
can understand
this language.