EN

 

Regine Petersen uses incidents of meteorite falls as a background for her work; an encounter of a woman with a rock that crashed through the roof of her Alabama home in the 1950’s, a group of children recovering a meteorite in their village in post-war Germany and a more recent event from 2006 in the closing chapter The Indian Iron, involving two Rajasthani shepherds. Just as meteorites could be considered time capsules, each chapter encapsulates a specific place in a certain time, questioning the notions of memory and history and the relationship between the ordinary and the sublime.

 

Setting out with scarce information - an article in The Hindu newspaper about two shepherd witnesses and a dismissive entry on a U.S. meteorite collector’s newsgroup - the artist located the impact site in a remote village in Rajasthan. Arriving at the site, she learned that the shepherds were nomads who moved on and were never seen again. The Indian Iron, even more so than the previous chapters, departs from a Western perspective on documentation and historical narrative, and looks instead at the barriers of language, cultural opacity and differing interpretations of "historical" events according to place, time and political background.

 

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