Evi Kliemand

Evi Kliemand is a painter, writer, poet, commentator and art educator. The five little Figurines (Rites de Passage) constitute a distinct body of work within her overall oeuvre. Kliemand fashioned them entirely from newspaper that she soaked overnight and that bled its ink into the water, causing the news to partially disappear. The bases of two figurines, upside-down cups, are also from her immediate surroundings. Some of the works were done in hospital. Kliemand made them for her friend, the cultural scholar Ralph Kellenberger (1952–2002) while accompanying him during his serious illness. In his essay “Damit leben: Götter-Welt”1, Kellenberger uses the term rite de passage2, harking back to the thoughts of the philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels when he cites Buddhist ideas according to which the path of the soul is considered a journey. As such, the title Rites de Passage opens up a metaphorical dimension: the figurines, an angel, a Buddha and three little boats or arks appear as symbols of safe passage and care but also as an expression of mourning and transition. Shaped from ephemeral newspaper, the figurines retain the traces of the hands that made them, becoming silent witnesses at the threshold between life and death. Christiane Meyer-Stoll silence folds back within us the booming breakthrough outside of time even without knowledge of stellar entwinement wild is the dance from beyond from beyond experience enough to be able to forget for today for today 3 1 The term goes back to the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep. Published in 1909, his main work Les Rites de Passage ranks among the foundational works of ritual studies. Van Gennep sees transitions from one social, cultural or cosmic state into another as “rites of passage”, dividing them into three phases: separation from a previous world, threshold or transition phase, and incorporation into a new status. 2 Published in: Farben aus der Ferne. Reisefotografie von Leon Kellenberger 3 Evi Kliemand, “Wer immer ein Herza hat (und die anderen Stimmen). Blätterwerk II”, p. 146.