Hen to Pan

Video excerpts, HD video, 2023

Hen to Pan engages with an archaic human mindset and is inspired by Carl Jung and Erich Neumann’s analysis of the symbol of the ouroboros in relation to “The Great Mother”  archetype in early matriarchal cultures.

In the piece, a storyteller guides multiple passages of an anonymous body that along with nature is bound to a perpetual, and at times violent rhythm of ritualistic formation and deformation. This body carries an amorphous identity: its limbs are missing and its flesh embraces elementary instincts and forces of inertia. It is a vessel, an ancient archetype that holds in itself the symbols and consciousness of early man. 

Hen to Pan moves within its own cycle, it is an autarchic great round, an ouroboros. Its myth is guided by the spirit of a snake in the pursuit of self-cannibalism, flowing back to itself and ending as a self-fertilized androgynous entity.

The work was supported by the Goethe Institute in Berlin.