Das Paradies in a moment of Crisis

This performance was inspired by Roelant Savery’s painting Das Paradies, painted in 1626 and exhibited in Gemäldegalerie where the performance also took place.

In Savery’s painting the myth of the protoplasts, Adam and Eve, is fully represented by a baroque visual narrative. Beginning in the foreground of the painting, a multitude of animals of all kinds occupy the surface, leaving no gaps in between. Further back in the rear of this suffocating landscape, the figures of Adam and Eve beside the forbidden tree remind us of the idealized image of heaven just before it was lost forever. In the centre of the canvas, a large brown bull, a symbol of power, violence and sexuality dominates the image, heightening the tension between virtue and lust, temperance and greed, eternal and mortal life. Under these circumstances, the moment of crisis temporarily hidden beneath the colourful alternation of plants and animals seems inevitable.
The artist slowly placed used bricks on her belly while not stopping to look at the red apple she held in her left hand for more than two hours. Calm sounds of nature surrounded her attempt to move without dropping the bricks or taking her eyes off the coveted apple. In the end she ate the apple, freed herself from the bricks and left the gallery space. With this performance, the artist tried to make visible this moment of crisis when harmony and beauty begin to create more oppression than pleasure.