dekarnation

Eva Maria Leuenberger's visually powerful debut "dekarnation" consists of four cycles. She invents perpetuating stories by connecting and varying themes and motifs within the cycles. The texts vibrate and pulsate, the words animate valley and moor, ravine, stream and forest. We experience a humanization of nature: "the wind in the trees claws / on the skin, and only the night / is safe /there are the windows open: / breathe the air as if it were free." Nature appears powerful, alive and always in motion. If, on the other hand, a sound, whether soft or screaming, sounds for the last time from the body of man, he is already about to fall silent. We listen to the speaking dead, whose voices sound soundless and penetrate the silence of nature; we look at bog bodies - Elling's wife and the Tollund man - and see their bodies lying close together in timelessness; a body in the river slowly finds its own hand, while layer by layer the decarnation proceeds; a body wandering alone through the valley then divides the water in two while floating in the river. The bodies enter into and are absorbed by nature. "imagine / the skin falling off you / like the bark / of another time / leaves growing on your spine".