Out Demons, Out

Barbara Kraus (as Aloise Schinkenmaier)
14 x 9 inches, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2019

Here's an odd one for you. The source image is a still taken from the video Out Demons Out, in which Austrian dancer and performance artist Barbara Kraus acts as the also Austrian medium Aloise Schinkenmaier. In one of the most ridiculous videos I've ever seen Kraus, as Schinkenmaier, meets her old friend Satan, a man in a bear costume played by Martin Leitner. It's not Kraus but Schinkenmaier who is featured in the top 100. I could not positively identify Schinkenmaier herself in any of the many photos associated with the German album Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik: Recordings of Unseen Intelligences, 1907-2007. On the second of that 3CD-set Schinkenmaier is heard as a medium picking up an unknown language while being recorded in 1967. Later the language was identified as a dialect of a little known Polynesian language. Schinkenmaier herself could not possibly have been aware of that language let alone speak it as if it were native to her. The recording clocks a dramatic two minutes in which Schinkenmaier narrates an emotional scene in this Polynesian language. I became interested in this recording in the context of something about memory that travels on a plane usually hidden to us (call it the astral plane,) the key to my hypothesis on the origin of music. In the zine Ach Ja #10: The Origin of Music (2) I wrote a paragraph headed "Dreams." 

Dreams contain images, sounds, and words that must be contained inside one’s being. Curiously the material contained in dreams might consist of features that were never experienced in one's life; places never traveled, languages never learned, sounds never heard, times of yore or future.  Where does this material come from? Archetypes, shared memory, or can the unconscious travel beyond our bodies to different times and different places? It’s known that our DNA contains of up to 3% denisovan, 5% of neanderthal, and a whole lot of early homo sapiens.  Along with DNA there would also be a memory, a trace of consciousness from our early ancestors.  We normally can’t access this information as it is stored deep down in our subconsciousness.  There are however atavisms, and there are still pre-industrialized (illiterate) people whose memories exist on different planes then ours. Oral traditions, counter-intuitively perhaps, can subsist through hundreds, even thousands of years. 

While it's easy to dismiss certain unexplainable phenomena as fake or trickery, I am not convinced that things that aren't easily explained, or don't fit known workings of the physical world, are therefore non existing.