‘Syncretism’ describes the fusion of different natural-cultural elements into a new form of expression. The English word ‘site’ refers to a place, a factory, a location, a site or also, the virtual localization on the net: the web site. Different practices and forms of knowledge, non-modern and modern cosmologies, poetic and exploratory procedures share this space. A syncretic understanding opens the world to complexity and density. Thus, what is layered, entangled, enmeshed and fused together creates not one single worldview, but worlds of coexistence – in plural.
Every era has to reinvent the project of “spirituality” for itself. In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is “art.”
Susan Sontag in “Aesthetics of Silence” (1967)
Syncretic Sites is characterized by a benevolently critical examination of both concept and practice of spirituality. The works open up references around the ephemeral, the immaterial and the spiritual, in its broadest sense. The relationship between primarily modernist spaces of contemporary art and non-modern forms of knowledge takes place as a constant negotiation with the “project of spirituality,” as Susan Sontag describes it in the quote above. In this, subtle or repressed forms of knowledge are often lost. Through formats of listening, pausing, and tracing, we come to syncretism and discover what might otherwise go unnoticed.
The invited artists specialize in following and augmenting the traces of events long past, forgotten or happening in the future. Similar to deep geological drilling, processes of sedimentation appear, which took place on site a long time ago, are taking place unnoticed at the present moment, or are yet to take place in a distant future. The speculative and the present are interwoven and played back through various media. Invocations, prayers, laments, hopes, blurs, miniatures, dissolves, echoes and new forms of archiving characterize this Protozone.
Supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur, Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung, Stiftung Temperatio, Migros-Kulturprozent, IPF Institute for the Performing Arts and Film from Zurich University of Arts
