Religious ideas have greatly influenced cultures – and even for many people who consider themselves non-religious, angelic figures have a place in their education, in their language and in their everyday imagination. In particular, the performing and visual arts, literature and music have also taken up the topic of “angels” again and again and have worked on the theme of the “language of angels” and the “transmission of messages”.
The art project Language of Angels forges links between these worlds of imagination. Individual parts of the project are carried out as participatory art projects and thereby tie in with the experience of working with aesthetic education projects.
The first part of the Entangelment project 2021/22 (“Gestures as Mediator between Cultures”) focused in photo challenges, dance workshops and performances on pictorial representations, photos of angel figures and other messenger figures whose gestures have a readable meaning, and on their translation into other forms of representation. In the second part in 2023/24, Entangelments will focus on the “writing of the angels”.
In 2000, Robert Krokowski developed the scripture, first as a handwriting, two years later also as a font. Many of those involved in the project work with the characters in their own and in collaborative works. They combine them with images, sounds, scents, gestures and movements. And they give meaning to the characters that are put together to form words, sentences and texts.
The name “Schrift der Engel” (Writing of the Angels) was found in 2005. Since then, it has also revolved again and again around the question of which messenger figures exist, what a message is, who transmits a message, who is the sender and who is the receiver. Which messages appeal to the senses and which to the mind?
In the project, the participants explore what happens when traces become messages – and what language the messenger figures speak. From 2023 to 2025, Libertad Esmeralda Iocco, Marlen Wagner and Robert Krokowski will follow the trace of writing again in the Fraktalwerk projects “Entangelments” and “Traumbeute”. Workshop results will be exhibited in Bergün (2023), in Berlin (2024) and in Chemnitz in the horizon of Capital of Culture 2025.
Part of the project will be to create a glossary – from the meanings already given and from new ones to be added by people we invite to give words from the scripture of the angels their own personal meaning.
The Entangelments project “Glossary of the Language of Angels” will start in January 2023 and information will be available on this project website then.