LG tags: Installation, Film, Art, Liturgy, Experimental
In an effort to help you know what to expect from each festival event and to decide which events you’ll most enjoy, we’ve created a Level Ground tagging system.
Ritual Cycle
Ritual Cycle, a series of five experimental films created by the Nomad Solstice Collective, explores divine identity through sacred, unique rituals. The viewer is invited to travel into a space that challenges how you view God. Mother Godde and Interim Ignis — the first two films on exhibit at Level Ground — explore grief, separation, and cleansing as examined through the lenses of both the feminine and masculine divine.
Film allows us to access a familiar visual language while experimenting with new ideas (such as the divine as genderqueer or feminine) that many haven’t considered deeply, if at all. The malleability of the medium allows us to transport viewers into an immersive world in which thought and time transpire in ways that are very different than within our default existence.
Ritual Cycle is intended to provoke viewers, whether you come from religious backgrounds or not, into re-examining your concepts of divinity. With rituals unmoored from the familiarity of our various religions, we hope to provide a safe, yet challenging space for a wide variety of people to begin asking questions. Does removing the divine from the constraints of a single gender broaden a viewer’s faith, cause deep discomfort, or both? How do you react to meaningful rituals that do not resemble the expected rhythms of your own faith or background?
The communal, flexible nature of film allows us to create rituals and spaces that are not tied to any one practice, but push beyond these boundaries. It allows us to beautifully subvert the concept of the divine and provide a space in which to deconstruct preconceptions and explore deep emotions.
All are welcome to join us as we wander through this in-between, this sacred space. (N.S.)