On our first scouting trip to Graz, Austria, for this project, I noticed empty niches in the corners of some 19th-century buildings, which surely once held religious sculptures. An empty niche on the corner of a building, nine meters up, is easy to overlook. But the same habit of fixing on the irrelevant that once made me stop before a street sweeper whistling as she swept (Fatalismo Mágico), or before a dog trembling now and then at the entrance of a mosque in Istanbul (Sinus-Köpek), was the trigger for this piece. This time I didn’t see a niche: I saw a fossil.
We asked the Grazer Kunstverein, which commissioned this piece, to research procession traditions in the city, yes, but above all in the surrounding villages, in the Alps. A custom and a history of Alpine processions we had known nothing about came to light: the so-called “Perchtenlaufen,” a cosmic rite that its practitioners link to the rebirth of daylight after winter’s nocturnal reign.
The Grazer Kunstverein organized a meeting with one of these traditional groups, which led to a video record made in parallel with the project. The comments on the video on YouTube still surprise me: most of today’s inhabitants not only don’t know the origin of this tradition but, in many cases, despise it.
PERCHTENLAUF, ST. JOHANN IM PONGAU, DOCUMENTARY BY C.S.
We decided to integrate a local wind band. I composed four short looped pieces for them to perform, for each one I created a two-band choreography (two choreographic lines), and I included the bells of several of the city’s churches. These audios are demo tapes for rehearsals.
Brot (excerpt)
Tanz der Peces Ausentes (excerpt)
Urzellen (excerpt)
Friedhof des Lebens (excerpt)
In the words of those who still practice this tradition, the Church made the continuation of these processions conditional on a substitution: non-religious objects had to be replaced by religious symbols. But this substitution was never exclusive to the Alps. In Galicia, the Ara Solis, a Celtic altar to the sun at Cape Finisterre, with worship documented since the 6th century BC, was destroyed, according to legend, by Saint James himself, who built a chapel on the same spot. Throughout the region, thousands of wayside crosses, the cruceiros, are commonly believed to stand where menhirs once stood: a cross grafted directly onto older stone. The Church placed these symbols at crossroads to erase a pagan belief in a nocturnal procession of souls, the Santa Compaña, and, as it later admitted, achieved the opposite: villagers took the cross as proof that the procession was real. Religion did not erase what came before. It stood on top of it.
SEVERAL TRADITIONAL PERCHTENLAUF STANDARDS.
The creative freedom of the standards impressed us and became our source of inspiration, as they reflect a kind of “frozen interaction” between the inhabitants and their environment, or at least a nostalgic view of it: taxidermied animals, household objects, plants, and geometric forms, carried on the back like portable cosmovisions in which two- and three-dimensionality mix with elements of interior spaces (chairs, tables, household objects) and exterior ones (landscapes under control). This notion of control over nature is not ubiquitous: it is not the Pachamama of the Andes, nor Tláloc in Mexico (a living and omnipotent nature); nor is it the relationship the peoples of the southern plains, on land that was then Mexican, such as the Comanche, Kiowa, Lipan Apache, and Mescalero Apache, held with the bison before the invasion of their lands and the extermination of both; nor is it, further north, the Sami’s relationship with the reindeer in Scandinavia. Europe itself once practiced something close to this: cave paintings, therianthropic figures, and the pre-Christian processions themselves suggest a living, non-functional nature that kept company. Christianity fought it for centuries. Just two of many documented examples: one, Frankish kings fined those who made vows at sacred springs and groves as early as the 8th century; the other, the Council of Nantes, in 895, ordered the destruction of trees consecrated to deities, which it called “demons.”
Viertel nach Schatten thus turned out to be a mixture of “tradition,” community participation in the construction and design of the standards, a contemporary procession that seemed at odds with present-day life in Graz — announced, moreover, by the bells of four rarely visited churches — and an exhibition at the city’s Orangerie, where the contemporary standards were displayed as the shadows [running “15 minutes” late] of a tradition most locals no longer know or practice. As a mother cell of Fatalismo Mágico, Viertel nach Schatten started from the same gesture as its successor: stopping before the irrelevant until it no longer is.