Saman work group
connects ethnological archive images, drawings and threads to form open networks. It addresses shamanic worldviews, plant knowledge and knowledge as a respectful approach.
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Group of works
without title (Indigenous knowledge networks / plants – transitions – silence)
Mixed media, archival material, photography, drawing, threads, pins
Work description
This group of works deals with indigenous cultures and their relationship to nature, in particular with shamanic worldviews and ethnological research approaches from the 20th century.
Archive images, ethnographic drawings, botanical depictions, photographs and film fragments are connected to form open networks. The individual elements come from different times, cultures and contexts, but remain deliberately fragmentary. What emerges is not a complete narrative, but rather a network of traces.
The connecting threads do not mark historical causalities, but rather resonances: recurring motifs of plants, bodies, transition, ritual and change in perception.
Shamanic motifs and worldviews
Central image motifs refer to shamanic ideas about world structure and knowledge:
the journey between worlds
the world tree as an axis between earth, underworld and heaven
the transformation of the body
Plants as mediators between the visible and the invisible
A recurring motif is the climb - symbolized by the tree, the climbing, the vertical movement. In Hungarian folk tradition, climbing the World Tree is a symbol of the shamanic journey to heaven. This idea combines mythology, ritual and knowledge.
“A sámán egyik feladata a másvilágok felkeresése.”
(One of the shaman's tasks is to search for other worlds.)
Ethnology, research and borderline experience
The works indirectly refer to ethnological research on shamanism, in particular to archive material from the second half of the 20th century, including film footage from Shamanism in Eurasia (1988).
At the same time, the group of works asks questions about the motives of Western researchers and thinkers who dealt intensively with psychoactive plants and indigenous knowledge:
What was actually understood – and what was just translated?
Where does research end and where does projection begin?
Which experiences can be documented and which cannot be used in any language?
The works do not address intoxication, but rather the structure of the search.
Silent monument
The work is seen as an indirect, silent monument to María Sabina - not as a portrait, but as a recognition of a knowledge that evades complete appropriation.
The plants do not appear here as substances, but as actors of another cognitive system.
Knowledge is not extracted, but received - limited in time, context-dependent, fragile.
Translation and the present
A contemporary reference point is the film poster Silent Friend by Ildikó Enyedi. The title acts as a key motif for the entire group of works:
The plant as a silent companion, not as a tool.The works ask what it means to enter into a relationship with nature - without instrumentalizing it.
Not loudly, not spectacularly, but attentively close by.
Open structure
The installation is deliberately designed to be open.
There is no central point of view, no prescribed reading.
The viewer moves through a visual archive that neither teaches nor explains, but rather invites a cautious approach.
These works do not show complete knowledge.
They show respect for what cannot be fully understood.