Sacrifice
This work was begun on the Greeks island of Kefalonia. The video follows the path up the mountain of Enous to a sacrificial site that had been in use since before the bronze age. I became interested in the idea of time and sacrifice. It struck me that sacrifice is about time and being able to affect a future time by an action in the present. Where better to project than the top of a mountain. I wanted to render the sense of the passage of a sacred procession as a point of view of someone from ancient times witnessing the forest and becoming at one with the vibrant spring life of the mountain.
The underlying subject of the video are the Kefalonian pine trees that cover the top of the mountain. For centuries, these tree has been plundered by a succession of civilizations. Venice is built on Kefalonisan pine trees as were the ships of all the great Greek city states because their resistance to rot. The trees are revered and fiercely protected as you cannot take any wood off the mountain. In the animation, I used sand eroded from the mountain to render the opening sequences in, amongst other scenes, which individual grains of sand can be seen forming trees forming and dying.
I made a sacrificial sculpture from dead wood I found on the mountain that is seen in the video which I left at the site and is, for all I know, still there. I choose to represent a goat in the animation and in sculpture as the fate of the Kefalonian pine trees are indeed linked to goats. There are at present large herds of goats on the mountain eating newly shooting pine trees. No new trees are growing. I saw that offering a sculpture back to the mountain was my way of trying to affect perceptions of the relative value of goats to an ancient forest that once gone is gone for all time.
The music is sung by a Japanese collaborator Kasan whom I asked to go to a forest and record a vocal impression (along with battery powered keyboard) of how she would feel if this forest was dying.
Name:Hobart Hughes