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Abstract

In May 2020, in the midst of the first big lockdown in Germany, I had the idea of conceiving an international arts project. A project related to the idea of infection, but also based on the pun on Covid/Ovid, with the C in parentheses – (c) – so that it resembled the sign for copy(right) – with the larger idea to create ‘positive antibodies,’ so that art could attempt to become a ‘healing force’. … I asked my sound artist friend Lasse-Marc Riek, if he would like to jump on board –and he did: Lasse-Marc was an incredible comrade in actually organizing all this: we ended with 19 sequences (Covid 19), played by 133 international artists.

Ovid's world is both a quest for an origin and a history of the world as a continuous metamorphosis - but that’s not all there is to it: it is a world of metamorphoses through violence. Change equals male aggression and dominance. This very myth underlies our (Western) culture, has influenced our thinking, our imagination for thousands of years – nothing in this world that is not permeated, inspired, infected by the myths: myths of violence correspond to the violence of the myth. Must this go on forever? Is the myth a virus that has infected us incurably? Or, is it possible that COVID is the counter-event to OVID, the pharmakon that immunizes us by infecting us in turn, promising an interruption of eternal recurrence?

The ancient texts are brimming with politically incorrect content. Sweeping them under the carpet or trivializing them is fatal for our cultural and historical self-perception. Instead, let them become part of a highly topical, explosive and relevant debate – or, maybe not even of a debate! The binary, either|or strategies of the grammar of debate and discourse are also part of the myth. Thus, a change – a metamorphosis – might be possible, but maybe only in a game. In "real life,", λόγος (logos) speaks even through our playfulness, we think stately even when we play, we as musicians, as ‘commanders,’ choose our instruments, over which we command just as we (think we) command music, art, speech. The wish to live free of myths is also a myth, a wish that is understandable, justified, authorized by the power of myth. Thus, freedom might only be possible in playing, in art, in the willful subversion of heteronormative discourses. That is why we play, why we have to play, why we dare to play this game, and we call it ©Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a game with many participants. In the game, we let Ovid's myths fade away within us. This metamorphosis, this fading out of the myths happens by way of the game of The Broken Telephone – or, the surrealist cadavre exquis: it creates and designs series. The interplay of infection and information is at stake, information chains and sources of infection, and the series in which information or ‘meaning’ spreads, and it does so in spaces determined by us as curators.

The international participants come from the arts: from literature, music, video art, sound art and photography. They are the actors, but it is their practice that gives shape to the forces: the real agents are the transmission channels. The transmission paths, the infection paths between the hosts, the artists, are more than just a structure, and the mutations that run across them in the process are the real creators; the artists, once infected, do "their thing" – the metamorphoses happen in transmission, and our project makes them audible, visible, tangible.