Tattooed Tongues   2002
Briar Rose revisited
or: The Mechanics of Angel.ness


Mayke Nas about Tattooed Tongues:

'Tattooed Tongues is a strange multi-media mix of fantastically spiced music (Martijn Padding), ununderstandable esoteric texts (Friso Haverkamp) and almost static, etherical light projections on a huge screen. Luckily enough Mendel (Hardeman) brings in a few short, freaky interruptions, which somehow put the image and the music a bit more into balance. Specially the moment in which he films his own eye, fragmented through the rotations of a caleidoscopic tube, is breathtaking. Pupils melt together, eyelids vanish and reappear, eye corners shrink and now and then the eye lashes blink everything into pieces.
It's a pity the production is only performed once. "Pure waste of capital " says Martijn Padding in an interview, and he's right. "We have a wonderful orchestra, a fabulous group of soloists, and then it's only done once. " When the interviewer said he might as well be grateful that his work was being performed at all, and that a bit of humility would not look so bad, he reacted immediately: "Humility? ...come on! Gratefulness doesn't belong in art. Gratefulness is something for the Salvation Army."



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