A heavenly disaster: we look at the stars, if we are lucky we see the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Perseus, Andromeda. And further? Nothing else. The images and stories of the European starry sky are a more than two thousand year old blend of Babylonian-astronomical origins and Greek-mythological plagiarism. The last intervention in the firmament was made by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, who in the middle of the 18th century invented seventeen constellations for previously meaningless “gaps” in the southern sky in order to set a tiny monument into space using technical achievements such as a telescope or microscope.
The disaster is the exception, because, from the Andes to India: “It is typical of a starry sky that it represents the essential elements of a culture. So at night everything is in the sky that defines society during the day, ”says Raoul Schrott. “In a time before writing, our starry sky was a cinema of the night.” For three years now, the Austrian poet has been working on the pioneering literary and scientific project of an “Atlas of the starry skies of mankind”. 17 by the time it is published in 2024. From the Navajo to the Māori, from the Bororo to the Palawan, from the / Xam to the Aborigines: their nights reveal between thirty and eighty constellations.
As a translator of the "Iliad" and author of the "First Earth Epic", Schrott is used to oversized things, but this time the processing of the sources turns out to be extremely difficult and complex. He is very late in making the intangible cultural heritage visible for the first time. A hundred years ago, the author estimates, a lot would have been alive that is dying out today and has to be laboriously reproduced. The indigenous peoples were still dependent on the traditional constellations and deeply connected to them, be it as a calendar, for example for agriculture and fishing, or for religious reasons.
The laborious process of probing compares scrap with the restoration of 700 ceiling paintings from individual cultures that have faded after thousands of years.
From the story to the star to the image and back to history, there is a need for close exchange between the constantly researching writer, his colleague Christian Weiblen, who mediates between literature and astronomy, and the visual archeology of communication designer Heidi Sorg.
Usually only a line of text or a wall relief indicates the way - the rest is research, perspective, trying, discarding - and imagination.
"Painting by numbers" is what Raoul Schrott calls it.
Contrasting astronomy that is unknown to us with today's view of the world
The five-year work on the “global map of the cultural history of mankind” is made possible by the Art and Nature Foundation in Nantesbuch, Upper Bavaria. She also supports the project by developing a website as a platform for the “global network of stars” and their stories. The beginning of the accompanying cultural program, curated by patron Claudia Baumhöver, was made last week with the first “Starry Sky of Mankind” festival with the two main focuses Inuit and Tuareg. The fact that the sky in the Bavarian foothills was cloudless from Thursday to Sunday, day and night, was not only helpful in terms of topic, it was all the more important because the events, which were sold out at lightning speed, could also be experienced via headphones on the landscape radio on the spacious grounds due to the corona.