Darya von Berner

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Marcha de elefantes - Mannheim

Galeria Angelo Falzone
Mannheim, Germany, 1996
Wall painting, objects and performance
Foto: Claus Stolz and Andreas Winkler

The most impressive images of this series of ephemeral paintings, were developed in a gallery space of almost 1000 square metres. For this performace, von Berner relied on the generous help of five volunteers.

The performers were painted in the same style like the mural. So visually they would become a fragment of the elephant, just like in the well-known Hindu fable, in which six blind wise men, explain how an elephant is. But each of them describes the elephant from their partial and fragmentary viewpoint, none of them achieves to give a vision of the elephants totality.

In our society elephants appear in form of toys, logos, cartoons and also documentaries, all of which are partial visions, they make it impossible to perceive what the presence of a real elephant in his natural habitat can really transmit, moreover we can not really understand the significance of the extinction of this animal and its natural habitat.