Mariela Limerutti Visual Artist, Argentina.


HANSEL & GRETEL
a tail from the Grimm brothers
Retold by Andrea Acosta and Mariela Limerutti 1057-2006
Germany
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HANSEL & GRETEL – a tail from the Grimm brothers

An intervention in public space (video) and in the story (in the real tale of the Grimm Brothers)

(Extract of the edited booklet)

…Once upon a time, Graciela Montes said, "Playing used to help us understand life, and also art helps us understand life. But not because the tales say certain things in a different way or explain what happened to us through examples, but because of the consequences brought by inhabiting them, by accepting the game. Because of the quality of going through that fiction has, of lifting things that are covered. Looking to the other side. Cracking what seems smooth. Offering cracks to slip in. Abandoning the excess. Exploring the terrains of frontier, going inside the shells that people hide, the links, the ideas". (MONTES, Graciela. La frontera indómita. En torno a la construcción y defensa del espacio poético. Fondo de Cultura Económica. México. 1999. Page 28)

What is going to happen with us? How can we find the way home if we don't even know how we got here in the first place? How can we know if the story of Hansel and Gretel is just a tale or if it is the product of our own experience, when it has been retold so many times and it is so deeply rooted in our collective memory? It´s no longer important who the authorship belongs to, for its only the tale that makes this journey possible and inspires this action, a re-appropriation of the story and its subsequent reconstruction within a German context.

- "Only in this environment, the story of Hansel and Gretel comes to life. In this change of place, what this fictitious fairytale means to us changes too", said Andrea. First, because of the fact that it was written in this country, and second because of the displacement of time and space we have suffered in coming to this new land, a break in the timeline of our own personal history. We are trying to find, once more, the path we have lost through a re-appropriation of the strategy used by the authors of this tale; the marking and losing of the trail (writing and erasing like Freud proposes in his writing about the mystic path), a play of contradictory forces, the connection of two opposite worlds that want to meet and coexist. Every remembrance involves forgetting…