Warum es Wüsten gibt:  Phaetons Reise und andere Metamorphosen, nach Publius Ovidius Naso in Brandenburg.

2015, artist book, collaboration with Marie Luise Birkholz. Design: Christoph Steinegger.
Textem Verlag, ISBN 978-653971-14-2

It is 2011. Marie Luise Birkholz and Verena Issel have just graduated from art school. What now? They reach for the stars — and probably fail. It’s an old story: Phaethon showed how it’s done. He borrows the sun chariot from his father to prove he is a demigod. But he is too weak and loses control. Phaethon veers off course — getting too close to the heavens and wrecking the star constellations (which is why they no longer form clear pictures), then plunging too close to Earth — scorching the mountaintops (leaving them bare) and burning entire regions (hence the deserts). He even burns whole groups of people (the conclusion is an ancient error in logic we might or might not forgive after a few thousand years).

Greece, the source of these myths and the cradle of our culture, can no longer hold its course either: its economy has become a desert, in 2011 it is overwhelmed by debt and EU sanctions.

But one doesn’t need to look so far away — even closer to home, things are not particularly blooming in 2011.

The county of Brandenburg is naturally a sandy one, but the whole of Eastern Germany is economically rather a desert after reunification. 

In this spirit, Verena Issel and Marie Luise Birkholz borrow a cart — a covered wagon pulled by two massive draft horses — and, like Phaethon, set out on a weeks-long journey through Brandenburg.

In the wagon we find the two newly minted art graduates — along with plenty of hay and art supplies.

Their journey becomes a moving re-enactment of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, restaging ancient myths through performances with local residents, photographic tableaux, sculptures, paintings, and objects — all created spontaneously along the way.

The final outcome is their own book of Metamorphoses.  One might ask whether the metamorphosis from art students to artists has, in fact, succeeded.