MYSTICA

MYSTICA will be a multidisciplinary ritual with hair suspension and choir singers in which we collectively come back into contact with the deeper layers of our consciousness and search for the possibilities for individual and collective transformation. Assuming that real change can only come about by incorporating our shadow side, space is created for betrayal and forgiveness, light and dark.

MYSTICA has as its ambition nothing less than the temporary liberation of the self and the use of the spiritual: not as an escapist desire, but in the radical acceptance of reality as it is.

The project starts from a fascination for the twelfth-century Hildegard Von Bingen. As abbess she wrote works on medicine, botany, cosmology, philosophy, musical compositions, poetry etc. When she was 43 years old, she had visions that were subsequently recorded and she thus wrote herself into history as a female, Western mystic.

MYSTICA goes beyond the biographical fascination with one individual and delves into the symbolic meaning of female, mystical figures in European history and recalls their presence. Many female mystical figures are on the margins of our historiography, present but underexposed. We vaguely know names such as Hildegard Von Bingen, Hadewijch d’Anvers, Margareta Porete, Teresa Van Avila, Evelyn Underhill, and others.

MYSTICA searches for the lost undercurrent of mystical, feminine energy in our culture and thus raises questions about what we can or should learn from our own underexposed aspects.