FLYING CREAM
We recreate the flight of dissidences
performance
In this performance, we recreate the flight of dissidences and narrate a story of plants, trance, and physiological, ecological, botanical and chemical knowledge. An ancient story of travelling plants, before the fateful 1492.
We cross the obsidian mirror and, in the darkness, encounter colours, pleasures and knowledge glowing at the core of our bodies, where attempts to annihilate us continue.
This piece is a celebration, a trance to lift the silence that pathologizes our pleasure and to remember that there can be no joy or knowledge without interspecies relations.
The witches' ointment, often cited in European witchcraft trials, was a plant preparation applied to the skin and/or mucous membranes of the rectum or vagina to induce altered states of consciousness. Like Ayahuasca in the Amazon, it also enabled the construction of worlds with plants.
Current scientific debates around this ointment have led several scholars to discredit the existence of pre-Christian shamanic cultures in 15th-century Europe that used psychotropic plants. Historians and botanists argue that Datura, a plant native to the Americas and present in many ointment recipes, could not have been used in Europe before the colonisation of Abya Yala.
The name Datura comes from the Sanskrit dhatūra, and its flower is associated with Shiva. Sources from India, the Arab world, Persia and Andalusia support the hypothesis that this plant reached other continents before colonisation.
The absence of ritual continuity in contemporary European culture does not confirm the absence of these practices. Rather, it opens a field to be reconstructed, crossed by taboos, silences, secrets and the production of ignorance.
Credits:
Music: Sigolène Valax
Live animation: Camille Olympie
Video: aniara rodado, Camille Olympie
Costumes: aniara rodado, Camille Olympie, Joaquim Netto Almeida. Fluid screens: Jean Marc Chomaz, aniara rodado
General assistance: Joaquim Netto Almeida
With the support of: Association IDEM and Festival Transform, Marseille.