Exhibition at Nuda Gallery
“The human body exists in the physical world, and her physical organs, her entire structure, are so constituted that one also looks for her consciousness in this physical world. But to find the organizing essence of the anthill or beehive, one cannot limit oneself to the world where bees or ants live in their physical bodies: the ‘conscious spirit’ must be sought in a completely different world. The deeper one strives for a true mystery science, the more unassuming one becomes. Where one gazes into higher worlds, no wisdom assists.”
– Rudolf Steiner
It begins with an earthly seed, in which the initial human potentials are enclosed. In this seed, what would constitute the first human souls was contained. Or rather, everything truly begins on Saturn, in the first stage of human cosmic life – for humans existed long before there was any Earth. On Saturn, the human physical body was formed, and it was completely lifeless, only a mineral, but the Saturn and the mineral I am talking about here are not the same as today. Even though there is a dualistic tension in anthroposophical developmental doctrine, Rudolf Steiner argued that everything is spiritual. On Saturn, in the hidden depths of sleep, the origin of life lay dormant, to be awakened by the sun and the moon – a small piece of macadam in every swirling being.
Therefore, the human physical body should not be seen as something separate from the spirit. In the Earth’s fourth age during the Lemurian era, early humans were still connected to the physical and chemical forces of the lifeless things they knew, with a kind of symbiotic intuition, she could influence her own body or things in her environment. But as the outer world solidified, and humans began to think and will, we lost contact with the body and the world around us. We had less and less influence on the transformation of things as we delved deeper into our own consciousness. To take the step to a higher realm, we were forced to leave the mineral kingdom behind and thus cloud the link between our spiritual and physical being.
The exhibition “Macadam,” the first of four in the exhibition series Akashic Chronicle, depicts the dawn of humanity from the mineral kingdom and the body as a phenomenon in relation to the spirit. In a different way, it tries to demonstrate the pain and effort involved in the soul’s submission to the world of minerals and molecules.
The exhibition series Akashic Chronicle has emerged from the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner’s book of the same title. In the book, written between 1904 and 1906, the author challenges the cosmic mystery. Rudolf Steiner takes on the ambitious task of describing the evolution of the universe, and especially human development through the four essential parts: The physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the spirit. Through four exhibitions in the sign of the essential parts, we resign ourselves to the arms of mysticism and align ourselves with the longing human soul’s need to seek a higher worldview, beyond materialism, beyond the transient individuality. Through the four exhibitions of Akashic Chronicle, we move closer to the essence of human spirit and the eternal weave of the soul.
