ESSAY—I TAKE SHELTER IN THE ANIMAL, IN THE OTHER AN ANIMAL SHELTERS

Reading instruction: you can start reading in any season, this is a cyclical text.


Winter 2025

apparent temperature: nostalgic
in: Asking permission from the local entities, out: Colonialism

I want to repeat myself. I am repeating myself. I want to repeat what has been repeated so many times. I want to go back, hide in goat skins. Before the people were there, before the people came here to do their human things with glasses of wine and champagne, with cooing and buzzing chatter, waving of hall texts and exhibition invitations and telephones with cracked screens, I crawled into a suit on the stage in the middle of the room. Now I hide here while my figure is looked at by greedy looks. It smells of animals, earth, blood. I have horns and hundreds of bells between my hair. Every step I take makes so much noise that there is no room for evil spirits here. The air is full of vibrations. Here I feel more-than-human. I return to knowing how far the day progresses by looking up, back to praying to the gods of rain, sun and moon.

When I get close, the other person recoils. The other who doesn't yet know that we are the same. I take shelter in the animal, in the other an animal shelters. There is a multitude of stories and rituals in me. I'm GLAMPUSS, but I'm also Krampus, Pan, Odin, Percht, The Wild Hunt, Faunus and who else. 

Once I sat with my goat's feet in the water at the edge of a waterfall. I had put my shiny high-heeled shoes in the grass. A bearded person waded towards me through the water and sat down next to me.  

‘Did you ask for permission?’ he asked.

I looked at him dazed.

‘We European neopagans’, he continued.

‘Sorry, who are you?’, I asked him.

‘I'm Arit, I'm a neopagan. Neopaganism is a collective term for (neo)religious movements that are based on pre-Christian European nature religions, such as Wicca, neo-shamanism or the Goddess movement. These religions have in common that they recognize a multitude of divine beings. They are also animistic. That is the belief that stones, plants, animals and natural phenomena are also animated.’

‘How funny, you sound like you're giving some kind of lecture’, I said.

Arit shook his head and continued with his story.

‘So, we European neopagans, we never ask for permission from the local entities’, he continued, ‘but from an animistic point of view, asking for permission is a sign of recognition of a community's way of life, but it is also a way of protecting ourselves. If you want to enter the water, you ask permission from the local entities, from the water spirits, whatever.’

I pulled my goat's feet out of the water in shame. 

‘Sorry’, I stammered.

‘We still have a colonial mentality. We think in opposites, in hierarchy, in one person or entity over another. Animism tries to bring together what seems contradictory, it is more about working together for the benefit of the greater whole. Let's not talk about good versus evil, but about creation and destruction. Holy and profane, ancestor and descendant, order and chaos, the dead and the living: everything is one, one cannot exist without the other, one exists ín the other.’ *

‘I'm sorry,’ I said, ‘I just put on this suit because I wanted to feel safe. It looked like a warm blanket. And my paws hurt because of those shoes, the water seemed so cool to me.’

Suddenly I saw a phone on the other side of the water on a tripod stand. We were live. Hence the monologue. I snuck out of the picture and at the edge of the forest I took off my coat.

* Freely adapted from Arit Härger in the YouTube video 'Animism: Asking for Permission'

Spring 2013

apparent temperature: late capitalist
in: Neopaganism out: Christianity

At ten to three in the afternoon I test the sound of my laptop and check whether my surroundings look neutral but not too neutral on camera. I catch myself feeling a bit awkward that Joris and Tessa are setting aside a whole hour for this interview, because they must be busy. Their design studio, MAISON the FAUX, makes installations, designs theatre costumes and makes exhibition designs for the Kunsthal, among others. In 2013 they started as a fashion label (MAISON the FAUX is loosely translated, ‘the fictional house’). Out of the desire to further deepen the performances and installations – which were already an essential part of their fashion shows – they chose a few years ago to close their sewing workshop and continue their practice as a design studio.

The fact that I feel burdened to ‘take up’ their time points to all kinds of uncertainties, but also to all kinds of ideas about time that I, as a westerner in a late-capitalist and post-Christian society, have taken for granted: you shouldn't waste time, you only have one life, idle hands are the devil’s workshop, etcetera. 

‘With Christianity, the idea of guilt and shame was introduced,’ says Tessa from their studio in Arnhem, ‘we prefer to focus on pre-Christian traditions. But we also work with fashion and luxury and we are also part of the system. We play a game. And we like to put a lot of things next to each other.’

They explain that they have developed their installation and performance GLAMPUSS at Das Leben am Haverkamp around Christmas [2024, ed.], a time when you are bombarded with a commercialization of Christian and pre-Christian traditions. 

‘We are capitalist spirituals’, Joris adds.

In GLAMPUSS, they play with the figure of Krampus (‘he still seems to be fairly untouched by commercialisation’), a demonic creature from Alpinist folklore who scares the hell out of small children and young women around the winter solstice in Germany, northern Italy and Austria. The role of Krampus has traditionally been played by (young) men who dress in goat skins, horns and a ‘krampus larva mask’, traditionally a wooden hand-carved mask. Their birch whip serves to ritually purify children and young women (in the latter this may also promote fertility), and in the woven basket on their backs they take the children who have really gone too far, if necessary. 

With the spread of Christianity, pagan and pagan traditions were banned or assimilated into Christian holidays. Krampus was allowed to stay, but in a supporting role alongside Saint Nicholas, an European saint.

When I walk away from my screen at four o'clock and look out the window of my city apartment, I don't see a single tree. Although, when I look closer, I see one brave specimen breaking through the asphalt at the guardrails of the four-lane road in front of my house. Neopaganism has been on the rise in Western cultures since the 1950s: (neo)religions such as Wicca, neo-shamanism or the Goddess movement are breathing new life into pre-Christian European nature religions. I wonder what it means to return to a nature religion in the 21st century, and light up some purifying incense.

Where the pagans around the year zero hoped to appease the rain and sun gods for a good harvest and could not yet explain the weather conditions with the help of science, we now know exactly what awaits us and we are left with the incomprehensible task of turning the tide. The climate crisis confronts us with our mortality and with the fact that we thought we could control nature. Maybe new old rituals offer us hope and something to hold on, maybe reconnecting with nature encourages consciousness and activism, maybe there is a divine entity that hears our cries for help. 

Summer 1985

apparent temperature: as if you are being clamped between the jaws of a crocodile for the third time
in: Non-dualistic thinking out: Patriarchy

When the visitors to the exhibition were smoking outside, I went back to my hiding place and dragged a pile of books into my hole. I felt vulnerable, the exhibition space as a clearing in the woods: the discomfort of standing next to a group with a glass in your hand and dripping off when you can't add something to the conversation. In my suit of animal skins I feel invincible. 

In the installation GLAMPUSS examines MAISON the FAUX pagan symbols and rituals. What do these mean in a capitalist society, and how do we seek guidance through the idea that we can ‘return’ to nature.

On Valentine's Day – originally a pagan holiday dedicated to the god Faunus – my beloved gave me the essay The experience of being prey by Val Plumwood gift, an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist known for her work on anthropocentrism. ‘You are to be eaten’, it was written on the wrapping paper. With my phone as a flashlight, I started reading.    

In her essay, Plumwood describes how she was attacked by a crocodile during a canoe trip. It's 1985, and she's canoeing alone on the East Alligator River in the Stone Country of Arnhem Land (named after the Dutch ship De Arnhem, which explored the Australian coast in 1623). Three times the crocodile pulls her under water in a so-called death roll, aiming for drowning. After the third time, she manages to get out of the water via a low-hanging branch of a fig tree. 

The attack radically changed her view of her relationship with nature. Somewhere she had forgotten two important things: first, she had neglected to ask the indigenous people for advice and permission, and second, she had forgotten that humans are an important prey species of the crocodile.

The fact that Plumwood had not seen himself as a prey animal brings her to the dualistic and hierarchical character of Western rationality. We understand the world on the basis of opposites such as man-woman, culture-nature, man-animal, in which one of the poles is always seen as superior to the other, and one pole excludes the other.

‘Ecofeminists such as Carolyn Merchant and Val Plumwood have shown that the association between nature and the feminine, which is clearly visible in the feminization of the earth as a mother or as ‘virgin territory’ to be ‘explored’ by men, is closely related to the historical oppression of women and other minority groups’, I read in the essay Find your E-spot!: ecosexual love, art and activism. ** From an ecofeminist perspective, structural inequality between people cannot be separated from the current climate crisis and ecological devastation is a direct result of Western rational thinking and the dominant idea of human superiority.

An alternative to the metaphor of the earth as a mother is to see the earth as a lover. This image stems from ecosexuality, a transnational grassroots movement, born at the beginning of the 21st century, in which climate activism, LGBTQI+ community building, sex-positive feminism and contemporary art come together. Artists and activists Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens are pioneers of this movement and put this alternative view into practice in a series of performances in which they declare their love for each other and a natural phenomenon. In 2009 they married each other and the sea in the Blue Wedding to the Sea during the Venice Biennale. By seeing the earth as a lover, someone for whom you want to do your very best, space is created for a relationship in which there is room for mutual needs and desires. 

Ecofeminist thought and the resulting ecosexuality have many similarities with (neo)pagan practices in which natural phenomena, plants, animals and other non-human entities are animated, and in which man is not above or outside nature, but is part of a network of relationships. 

** 'Find your E-spot: ecosexual love, art and activism', Louis van den Hengel, in 'Intieme Revoluties', Rahil Roodsaz and Katrien De Graeve (eds.), Boom, 2021

Autumn 2050

apparent temperature: as if death is on your heels
in: TIMELESSTIME out: linear time 

‘People are terrified of death’, say Joris and Tessa from design studio MAISON the FAUX when we talk about their performance installation TIMELESSTIME at MU Hybrid Art House curated by Angelique Spaninks and Gieske Bienert in 2023. Just as in the installation and performance GLAMPUSS at Das Leben am Haverkamp, their fascination for cyclical movements comes to the fore. 

The spatial and multimedia installation they made in the MU was divided into four ‘rooms’, which could be read as four seasons or four stages of life. Amidst installations made from straw, car tires and wilted flowers, performers danced with their lifeless image in the form of a doll. The dance ended with the loving burial of the puppets.

‘After burial, the dolls are also dug up again’, they emphasize. Some visitors reacted quite strongly to the performance, I understand from them. People thought it was grim, gothic, and morbid. In Western society, we prefer to imagine ourselves immortal and insure ourselves against every possible calamity. People read the burial of the dolls as a final end, as if time stops. And time is also going to stop: because you die, or because the earth is no longer livable due to the climate crisis. But death follows life, and destruction follows construction. 

MAISON the FAUX wants to reflect on the cyclical movements that are an inherent part of existence and embraces the complexity that this entails as a ‘clumsy human thing’ (Joris about a human on an adventure in the woods) in Western capitalist society, in search of meaning and something to hold on to.

In GLAMPUSS this results in an installation in which the half-demon Krampus is the focal point, reimagined through images of the fur-clad Olsen Twins. In the installation, they explore pagan symbols and rituals: how they were first assimilated by Christianity and how they are now being swallowed up by capitalism as a semi-spiritual commodity. Their Krampus is flanked by the symbol of the ourouboros, an animated hand makes gestures from Buddhism, Christianity and sign language, and DJ YoungWoman makes a soundscape that includes the glitching sound of Tibetan singing bowls. Around the arm of this spiritual Frankenstein is a modified version of the Fendi Baguette – one of the first It bags – as a pre-Christian symbol.

In our capitalist system, symbols and rituals are detached from their original context. Crystals, buddhas and dream catchers become decoration for the home or in the yoga studio. In Witte vrouw, Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ is niet van jou (White woman, Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ is not yours) about cultural appropriation, actress and writer Anousha Nzume tells what she encounters in yoga studios: an endless amount of Buddha statues (who has nothing to do with yoga), hanging coconuts and Ohm signs that have been hung the wrong way around. *** 

It is precisely these mechanisms, of appropriation, of human exploitation of nature and of structural inequality between people, that have ensured that our survival is threatened by something even bigger than our individual death, the climate crisis, that the West falls back on to curb the fears of the havoc we have caused ourselves.     

MAISON the FAUX puts non-hierarchical and non-dualistic thinking into practice. That which seems opposite exists side by side and in each other. In GLAMPUSS the impossible position in which we find ourselves is deepened, without rejecting, without judging. GLAMPUSS is also Krampus, is also the saint, is also paganism, is also Christianity, is also luxury, is also holy, is also profane, is also life, is also dead, is also construction, is also destruction and is also construction.

*** The chapter ‘Witte vrouw, Beyoncé's 'Lemonade' is niet van jou’ in the book 'Hallo witte mensen,' Anousha Nzume, Amsterdam University Press, 2017.

Read more about the exhibition GLAMPUSS here.

Author: Katinka van Gorkum
Editor: Laure van den Hout (Mister Motley)
This essay was originally written in Dutch. The translation was made with the help of Microsoft translations.

Image: TIMELESSTIME, 2023, by MAISON the FAUX at MU Hybrid Art House, photo by Hanneke Wetzer