BURLUNGIS

COVEN BERLIN with Yoav Admoni, Irene Fernández Arcas, Samantha Bohatsch, Hang Linton and Laura Lulika

23 Jan–8 Mar 20

Welcome to BURLUNGIS: Hang your cloak and stay a while, weary traveller. The times may be dark and the swamps and bogs hide lurking creatures of the night, but accept our humble comforts in whimsical tales and ecstatic dances around the fire.

BURLUNGIS is a fantastical medieval landscape conjured by COVEN BERLIN to re-imagine a time as dark as ours. But hark! Whoever condemns darkness has forgotten its power. Much of liberal European thought today continues the tradition of the Enlightenment, scoffing at the perceived lack of refinement and unhygienic stink of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, conservative right-wing movements have co-opted ’the medieval’, summoning kings and vikings to create an imaginary time when Europe was white, heterosexual, and Christian.

Aye, let the patriarchs have their snobby printing press and ’perspective’; let the fascists burn in their fire and brimstone. Leave the Mittelalter to the altered middle—to the queers, the Commons, the Live Action Role Players, modern herbalists and all those who’d gladly tread through the muck and mire of this swampy amalgam of history. We hereby decree the myth of ’Medieval Europe’ as utterly false, and rewrite it as BURLUNGIS, which bubbles out of the swamp from whence the city we call Berlin, in the 13th century, clumb.

BURLUNGIS begins as a stage for co-creation between us the artists and you, dear wanderer. Therefore we heartily invite you to show up at the Galerie im Turm regularly, for we will be a-working, oft and ere.

Exhibition text