The Beginning Tip for the dark season: A rush of light colors

A cloudy December sky steals the scene of light and color. The mendicant church, ubiquitous, showers its visitors with a cornucopia of bright colors. While Scandinavians are recovering from the blues in the winter months with 2,500 lux light baths in restaurants, the Genesis Project brings a sense of lift to surprised faces.

The Franciscans, who were very close to nature and creatures, created one of the largest German mendicant churches in Germany around 1255 on the site of a small monastery church. The city of Regensburg bought the entire monastery in 1931 and turned it into a city museum – as the home of the “Historical Museum of the City of Regensburg”. This winter, the Minoritenkirche is home to the “deep art installation GENESIS II” by the Zurich Projektil artist group.

“Let yourself fall” into soft bean bags

“Drowning” means “immersing”. You have to ask the artist group why this would work so well with empty English words. Perhaps this is meant to sound more international. Of course, you can strengthen or drown yourself without saying a word. Unlike museums, where you stand with your feet on your stomach or on hard concert chairs, “engage, surrender, surrender” is found here in a more comfortable way: in soft bags that the cold just enters. when the festival is almost over it’s over.

So that is the declared goal of immersive art: the viewer as part of the artwork – with all their senses. It is surrounded on many sides by swirling explosions of light color that constantly bring new patterns to the walls, columns and valves until they seem to lose their material solidity. A new world that emerges at the beginning of creation – or as a result of the Big Bang, however your own mind wants to create its reality. Just the beginning.

Genesis: the story of creation

Genesis, Greek for “emergence, origin, birth” – or Peter Gabriel’s Brit band of the same name. Last year, Genesis I showed the first days of the biblical story of creation in the Church of St. Ulrich in Regensburg – to the sounds of Gustav Mahler’s Urlicht. In an approximately 800-year-old church near the cathedral, God separated the water from the earth, created the space of heaven, opened the gates of heaven and enabled the birth of the first life on earth.

The setting of the light of Genesis II begins on Day 4 when God sets light in the firmament – the sun, moon and stars that illuminate the earth and mark the days, years and seasons. However, on the fifth day, he creates animals in the water and in the air: “Let the waters be filled with living creatures and let birds fly above the earth in the space of heaven.” The next day, the animals of the land follow – and finally humans too: “Let us be human in our likeness, like us, it is finished, may God have his day of rest after this great creation, bathed in light and color.”

Starting without light and sound

Before creation there is an idea, a force, an inspiration. The divine spirit in the Bible, which the artist group Projectil from Zurich reinterprets in color, light and sound. The 3D map projection system uses eight high-performance projectors to create animations, images and videos on the church’s architectural stone screen. For 30 minutes, the viewer forgets his surroundings and immerses himself in the act of creation: a new beginning of his own life.

Forget the petty arguments on social media for half an hour – the narrowness of your own perspective, the selfishness of society that excludes others if they have the wrong skin color, the wrong tongue, the wrong God. A little humility can’t hurt.