In a very old house, with low ceilings and secret compartments in the walls, visitors gather to perform a ritual called Hell. By recreating motifs from art history with our own bodies, we try to approach uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our lives. Once we have caught our breaths, we gather for the next ritual: Heaven. A ritual leader with blindfolded eyes describes her inner image of us sitting together. We do our best to resemble her description. When the ritual is over, we toast together in the kitchen.

With: Majula Drammeh, Linn Hilda Lamberg, Erika Lindahl, Benjamin Quigley, Maja Svensson

Producer: Erika Lindahl

Chef: Kristin Bergman

HEAVEN & HELL was a coproduction between Poste Restante, Skogen and Studio Gathenhielm. The project had support from Göteborgs stadskulturförvaltning and Kulturrådet. 

HEAVEN & HELL was a participatory performance piece written especially for Gathenhielmska Huset in Gothenburg, a building that has remained largely untouched since the 18th century and which, in 2019, housed three active fraternal orders. HEAVEN & HELL aimed to explore ritual as an individual and collective practice, and in what ways a reflection in mythological narratives can help or hinder the individual in their identity work. By approprating the fraternal order as organizational and aesthetic form, we wanted to investigate the conflict between common narratives and the personal perspectives and experiences that such generalized stories exclude. In our project, we drew on the work of French sociologist and cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and his socioanalysis of the androcentric unconscious 1, as well as French philosopher Luce Irigaray's view of language as essential to the formation of personal identity2. We combined these theories with structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss's ideas about mythology as a concrete expression of experiences that can't be put into words any other way.3 In HEAVEN & HELL, we combined these theories with theory drawn from affect-focused psychodynamic therapy, in which the process of giving the client access to language for their experiences, by reconnecting with the body's affect system, is seen as a way of giving the body access to its own language.4 Building on the assumption that we humans need mythologies/language to understand our experiences, combined with Bourdieu's assumption that our current mythologies/languages have a particular predisposition towards the experiences of dominant groups, we wanted to offer visitors the opportunity to engage hands-on with questions about the political nature of language and the personal nature of mythology.

1 Bourdieu, Pierre (1999). Den manliga dominansen. Gothenburg: Daidalos (Orig: La domination masculine, 1998)

2 Irigaray, Luce (1985). This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press

3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1979). Myth and Meaning. New York: Shocken Books

4 Lindert Bergsten, Katja (ed.) (2015). Affektfokuserad psykodynamisk terapi: teori, empiri och praktik. 1st edition. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur