The Ravine
Digging for truth An outdoor performance Duration: 56 hours In a grove of trees, out in the pristine countryside, for seven days eight hours a day and in silence using a shovel a man digs a pit in the ground with the hope of finding truth. Around the pit, eleven cut-down tree trunks stand in a circle, mute witnesses, hostages of the event. Humans dig holes when they want to grow something or build a house, create a pond but when they want to hide something or want to bury something they dig, too. If you know or think that something is buried you dig to find it. You might find a fossil, a bone that belonged to a living creature or something closer to your own space and time. The trees surrounding this work are the permanent spectators, other witnesses, the ones who were here, are here now and will be here when the artists depart. In this case we dig to find truth, to dig down to it, to find what it is. And as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing said, “The truth itself is not interesting, but the search for it”. We are not sure if that is true.