See ‘The Many Lives of a Snake Goddess’ for the project website. The faience ‘Snake Goddesses’ were found in 1903 in the so-called Palace of Minos at Knossos, which in Greek myth was the location of the famous labyrinth of the minotaur. The originals are now housed in the Heraklion Museum. For this project, we handled the replica plaster casts from the Ashmolean Museum, now historic artefacts in their own right. Our wider research considers how these striking figures have been reconstructed and reimagined since their discovery.
Here, we aim to compare different genres and styles of English, namely audio description (AD), slow looking, mindfulness, creative prose and poetry. We encourage listeners to consider how these distinct styles of spoken/written language lead and enable you to ‘see’, notice, and engage with the figurines differently.
There is a trilogy of passages for each figurine (‘Exercises in ekphrasis’), which play with different layers of description from different points of view (first person versus third person). The challenge for any audio describer is to create a rich, vivid ekphrasis concisely enough to hold the attention. These two sets of audio texts combine to a long account of each figurine; if you feel too long, what would you cut?
We then explore a trilogy created by Limina Collective (Karly Allen and Lucia van der Drift), including unguided viewing, slow looking, and mindfulness. Does such an engagement with art give us some needed ‘time out’ from the hectic bustle of everyday life? Can this support museums’ aims to provide wellbeing?
AD is created as access provision for blind or partially blind people, but we are keen to give agency to under-represented groups. Tanvir Busy, a partially blind writer, has created three pieces for our project, following a handling session with replicas of these goddesses. Her perspective on fragmentation, for example, provides fascinating insights into how we piece together what we see into sense.
Finally, we have a series of 15 poems by Ruth Padel, an award-winning British poet with a special connection to Crete. She excavated on the island as a student and has published a novel set there (Daughters of the Labyrinth, 2021); furthermore, she has experience in (non-poisonous) snake handling in India as research for her novel Where the Serpent Lives (2010). Poetry offers a wider, more personally associative interpretation of these material artefacts, and suggests more paths to new meanings.
These contrasting pieces promote very different genres of English creative writing. However, there are some traditional literary links – for example, the poetry of ekphrasis has much in common with audio description. Juxtaposed, their contrasting aims and intentions invite us to rethink the questions: what do we want art to do for us? How can we reignite the power of antiquities for the modern age? And how can language be stretched to embrace and describe the range and depth of human experience? We are also keen to explore how modes of communication developed by and for people with sensory impairments, such as audio description, can benefit the experience for all (in this case, sighted people). For this reason, we invite listeners to participate in a survey available.
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