Sand Stories
mit Stephen C. Levinson
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| 10 € |
| Duration: 60 min |
| 16 years and older |
| English |
| Special Exhibition 1, Ground Floor |
| Part of: One Object, Many Questions |
Sand stories constitute an Indigenous form of storytelling in Central Australia, where gestures and sketches in the sand simultaneously accompany the telling of myths and journeys – for example the stories of ancestral beings such as the Seven Sisters. The visual media (gestures and drawings) complement the spoken word, adding vital information, rhetorical emphasis and precision to the flow of information.
Taking as a starting point the video documentation of a sand story in the exhibition Songlines. Tracking the Seven Sisters , anthropologist and linguist Stephen C. Levinson speaks with curator Uta Kornmeier about the importance of spatial thinking in Aboriginal life, and how this connects to the use of gesture, to the sand drawing tradition, as well as to the landscape and its mythology. Together, we will discover how far visualization helps our own communication and our thinking.
Stephen C. Levinson is an anthropologist and linguist, formerly director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He has worked with indigenous communities in Australia, India, Mexico and most recently in Papua New Guinea. His research interest is language diversity and its implications for theories of human cognition.
Uta Kornmeier studied art history and museum studies and curated several exhibitions at the Berlin Museum of Medical History. Since 2020, she has been curator for academic events and programmes at the Humboldt Forum.