Managed by the
Hermit Foundation and the Society of Friends of Art on the grounds of
a former monastery, the Center for Metamedia-Plasy organizes programs and
projects where the visual arts in traditional and new media, music, performance,
theater all have the possibility to be interlinked -- "metamedia"
intimates the creative potential of this informal and organic confluence.
Above all, the Center seeks to provide a setting which fosters these collaborations,
communication in general, and experimentation.
(A passage from
an essay in the Meridian Crossings catalogue may add to your
sense of the Center's atmosphere and of the ideas that led to its founding;
to skip ahead to the excerpt click [here].)
Yearly international symposia have been held at the Center since 1992, with
all together more than 350 artists taking part. Over the years, other types
of projects were added to the program: workshops, exhibitions, festivals,
meetings, and most recently, residencies.
More information about the Center continues on the pages listed on the buttons to the left above. For application information, please go to the Residency page or to the Project page. Art projects prepared at the Center for Metamedia-Plasy for the Internet can be seen by pressing the WWW Projects icon. We would be interested in hearing your comments about our program and this web site, and in hearing from organizations working on similar activities: please be sure to contact us.
The Center for Metamedia-Plasy operates thanks to the generous support
of many institutions and individuals, foremost through the the Prince Bernhard Fund's
assistance with the purchase of technical equipment and, since 1996, the vital support
from the Ost-West Program of the Pro Helvetia Foundation.
passage from
"Midnight Meridians
from Plasy to the Land of Queen Maud
or Northern Lights and Southern Cross", Meridian
Crossings, 1995
Hermit is a name that can mislead. The foundation
is not involved with sequestering itself from the world or escaping from
reality or experimenting with current esoterics. The Hermit Foundation's
Center for Metamedia does however engage in a certain departure from the
banality of post-industrial, neurotic, consumer society in its search for
a quiet place where communication and discussion can occur. Real dialogue
is heard and comprehended in seclusion, far from the noise of advertising
and the mass media.
The concentration of culture, media, and power in the cities has emptied
the countryside, making it much more conducive to the creation of potential
"autonomous cultural zones," as, for example, monasteries had
sometimes been. In a system free of any valuation of mystery and intimacy,
hermetics can mean, paradoxically, precisely the openness to a space among
people. The hermeneutics of such an autonomous zone is marked by a silence
which empowers the sounds from the peripheries and the echoing word of the
people.
One such place was founded several years ago in an old, half-abandoned monastery
in Plasy, which was built 850 years earlier as a symbol of Christian hegemony
over the land and paganism, as an expression of the wealth of the Cistercian
Order. The estate later became the property of Chancellor Clement Metternich,
who sought to protect the European absolutist status quo from the pernicious
influence of the French Revolution. The ideologies of
both inhabitants did not allow much understanding for the freedom of art
or for tolerance of any sort. (The need for autonomy, personal liberty,
free cultural expression has not at all perished in the present secularized,
post-capitalist society, which has devised different ways to control our
lives.)
The somewhat spartan Meridian Crossings Symposium in Plasy was different
from the majority of art projects in its very multifaceted, hybrid character,
which brought it closer to traditional folk festivals, potlatches, and campsites
of contemporary nomads. In a place originally intended as an enclosed, hermetic
dwelling for the uniformity of a single religious Order, the symposium inspired the
qualities of liberalism, openness, celebration, hybridization, solidarity,
and brought out the chaos natural to aesthetics,
and "social conditions," as well as to the polyphony of the
arts. This was a glimpse at what a warmer climate might be like after the
melting away of political polarity, dogmatism, violence, the orthodoxy of
a single correct way of thinking, of pure art, of universal and timeless
truths, of official stupidity, chauvinism, and racial prejudice.
Guests of the Center for Metamedia's projects find themselves in the situation
of a temporary camp; they are thrown upon their own resources, upon their
capacity for consensus, orientation, experimentation, improvisation, upon
their ability to negotiate with others to settle upon the place where they
will work, to get what they will need, to discover where they will find
it. During the course of the symposium, none of the participants were forced
to abide by any requirement besides that of tolerance; they were under no
obligation to do anything, not even to "present" their work. The
environment, context, theme, form, character, and material they selected
was a matter of their own choice and contemplation, and all the individual
interventions upon the organism of the place taken together give rise to
the final, whole installation. As an illustration, I list here some the
materials, media, and devices with which the Meridian Symposium participants
worked: light, dark, electricity, iron, a radiator, sun, bread, copper vitriol,
water, a pump, onions, video, photography, fishing boots, a basement floor-plan,
alpine plants, an Irish boulder, branches, copper tags, time, text, flour,
wax, a slide projector, tea, porcelain, stone, canvas, a paintbrush and
acrylics, a tent, crates of soda water, weights, beef tongue, a scourge,
a plate and cutlery, linoleum, a tennis court net, voice, a whole range of
musicial instruments, feedback, neon, a phonograph, wire, a MIDI computer, cotton, puppets,
a magnifying glass, foam, UV light, beeswax, string, dance, goldleaf, 16mm
film, a camera obscura, a film projector, a ladder, coal embers, a tape
player, aluminum and iron armor, fire, cellophane, a sewing machine, sand,
a vacuum pump, a radio, beer, an old military uniform, cardboard, Silicon
Graphics software, an inflatable globe, the ticking of the clock tower, a
rear-view mirror, jay bird feathers, blood, tobacco and linden wood, a clock,
alloy, a timer, a relay, telephone wire and a bicycle bell, horsehair, words,
movement and fantasy.
For several of the year's warmer months, the former monastery is available
for accommodation, relaxation, work, for common meals, chats around the
kitchen table at breakfast and around the fire in the evening. What people
speak about here--that shared, immaterial, truly inter-medial and chaotic
structure of discussion--is as much an event as the installations, exhibitions,
workshops, concerts and performances. In these conversations it is possible
to discover the most profound, hermetic, and nearly incommunicable stratum
of experience which the Center's guests and visitors now carry only in their
memory. This is something that cannot be archived or preserved on photographic
emulsion, by video, in text, on digital disk, not even on the Internet.
It is something which is actually not possible to put into words. It is
something which could be a modest promise of changes for the better, because
only a few years ago a project like this here was only a wild utopian dream ....
Milos Vojtechovsky, 1995