Niebelungen Of Mayfair (2022)
Moving Image, 5 min HD video, sound.
Niebelungen of Mayfair was shot in the original live drawing room at Royal Academy of Art, London as part of the film project "When we left Centaury Cascades" and as part of 'Schwanen' immersive installation shown at Royal Academy of Art graduates show 2022.
Artist Lene Vollhardt
Actor Charlie Kafflyn
In pre-production: 'How we left Centaury Cascades' explores the abstract experience and real ecocidal consequences of spiritual tourism, and seeks to engage with the complexities of spiritual bypassing, while reflecting on the medicine of our anantecedents. The film asks the question, what shape does your life take on when it is no longer articulated by the grammar of human progress? Paraphrasing Sophie Strand, What does it mean to be ‘made by moments of inter-species impact’?
What does it mean to integrate the teachings of plants that have been afflicted by colonial erasure?
'How we left Centaury Cascades' seeks to engage with the concept of place and locality through the experience of herbal medicine, not only with the contested consumption of master-teacher plant Ayahuasca but also especially with the UK-local plant Centaury (tausend gueldenkraut), evocating the lore and mythology of Centaury, but also priming to rethink our concept of plants as live forms without consciousness, or agency.