1. Varanasi – Another World

How can you embrace another world? How merge into an unknown culture, with its different strata, its incomprehensible rules? Varanasi, the city at the Ganges, holy river into which everything and all is thrown – dead bodies, bone fragments from funeral pyres, flower garlands, tons of garbage, and more tons of waste water. This is the city I will dwell in for a few months, en voyage with thousands of people in endless motion, accompanied by an atonal symphony of horns and sirens.
     The mental images I brought with me from Switzerland are steadily transformed into experiences - during which process all certainties are questioned, reversed. My body suffers from the heat, from the unusual food, from the smog, from which it finds no escape in this eternal traffic jam. However, it is the body that gives me certainty of presence, that anchors me, my own body that I took with me, which I know, which makes me feel less of an outcast.
    «The body is the first place, the first husk, cell, boundary that surrounds me, the first house in which and with which I move. It is finally the body itself we use to indicate why we go and stay; through the body I can perceive and experience myself and reach my limits.» This citation from Volker Adolphs, German curator, in his recent publication «Going Staying – Movement, Body, Place in Contemporary Art», becomes the motto of my Varanasi visit.