Ousia

The O of Ousia is a circle. A sign of a period in which occurrences, especially coming and going, perhaps were mere returns. What about the occurrences of the Earth? Will people ever be encompassed within it? Will they flee? Who possesses the shimmering, self-generating oil, water, or glacial land? These golden loops of possession. The owner, I cannot help but laugh, sells them as curling ornaments. So much escapes the mother in thought, the approaching turns her children into incomprehensible rings. For this, log driving, the black river: the triad of a river landscape that has held various meanings for the region around Upper Austrian Molln for centuries. From the log driving of tribes from the furthest mountains to the propulsion of large paddle wheels to the demarcation of the entire course as a protected area, an observation and contemplation of the mystery and forces of flowing, beyond the childhood landscape. Tetsu-Sen, a cycle about a society leaving the Earth, translated onto another surface, towards another arrival, perhaps a completely different state of being. Hummingbird as a ring-shaped text that seeks to dissolve from the violence within a dictatorship into a realm of botanical dignity, only to freeze again in brutal actions against women who feel free. No less cold-blooded is the Chinese magician, who in the circle of lanterns with changing heads searches for a new head for his wife because he no longer likes the old one. And everything that is separate, which later seeks to reunite, into one, perhaps an unchangeable presence. Call it Ousia - that which has been shattered into a thousand pieces and is now being reassembled. - Verena Stauffer.