Shelley Sacks and Joseph Beuys: A Landing Strip for Souls
A LANDING STRIP FOR SOULS
WELCOME TO A PLACE OF QUESTIONS
This film shares Beuys' 'call' for the 'co-operators to come in' and the evolution of the Landing Strip for Souls.
Recounting Beuys’ request to me–in a sequence of five dreams just before the millennium–to create a ‘landing strip for souls’, this video takes viewers into the events around the making of the landing strip itself, the practices and works that have emerged from this, and the urgency of Beuys’ request to ‘make it possible for the cooperators to come in now’.
’A Landing Strip for Souls’ has been shared several times in a series of global online gatherings to coincide with the Kassel21-Social Sculpture Lab for the 2021 Joseph Beuys Centenary hosted by the documenta Archive and the Neue Galerie, Kassel.
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Still from the film: A Landing Strip for Souls. All rights reserved. Shelley Sacks. Hosted by the documenta Archive. 2021
Inauguration of the 100-day lab in Kassel, Germany hosted by the documenta Archive:
The first online gatherings took place in 2024 on Beuys’ death day: 23 Jan. These were followed by further events on Beuys birthday -12 May, in the centenary year, and again in 2022.
Contemplative exploration
These gatherings for groups of up to 50 people each, introduced one of my connective practices to enable a contemplative exploration of key questions about the sources and kinds of knowledge needed for shaping a living future for all. And reflections on the role of ‘ancestors’.
The Landing Strip for Souls is an ‘instrument of consciousness’ that has been shared several times since it was first created by me for Beuys in 2000. It is also an integral part of the FRAMETALKS ‘instrument of consciousness’ in the Social Sculpture Lab hosted by the Documenta Archiv and the Neue Galerie, Kassel for the Beuys Centenary.
A huge deerskin, destined to be shoes and handbags, is lifted out of the production process to become an 'instrument of consciousness: a place for recognising how we live in the world and relate to other life forms.