(c​)​ovid’s metamorphoses

With a wide range of works by sound artists and musicians, writers, filmmakers, photographers and visual artists, @ovid’s Metamorphoses takes the COVID-19 pandemic and its vast consequences as an instrument of change, artistic and otherwise. A game of experimentation between different fields of artistic practice, all the works gathered revolve around ideas of transmission and inspiration and convene a huge corpus of vital, bold and openly avant-garde artistic expressions.

@ovid’s Metamorphoses is a project driven by Bernd Herzogenrath, professor of American Literature and Culture at Goethe University Frankfurt, and by sound artist Lasse-Marc Riek. It brings together contributions from artists in film, sound art and music, writing, visual arts and photography, with the aim of subverting the idea underlying Ovid’s Metamorphoses —metamorphosis and progress through violence— and of positing the COVID-19 epidemic as a possible counterweight to the myths on which Western culture is based. All the works presented here are traversed by the idea of play as a fundamental artistic act. Contagion and transmission give way to an artistic practice that leaves behind the myths that have defined Western culture for centuries.

@ovid’s Metamorphoses brings together an astonishing amount of sound pieces, films, texts, photographs, drawings, comics and paintings created by numerous artists working at the forefront of their respective fields. An intertextual game about beauty and meaning gives rise to works that often get lost in transmission and inhabit an existence beyond common definitions, both aesthetic and moral, that traverse our culture. All participating artists have exchanged ideas and pieces, dissolving myths through the game of broken telephone. At the intersection between contagion and information, between information chains and contagion outbreaks, new meanings propagate in spaces defined and determined by all the artists.

The (c)ovid’s metamorphoses box contains seven CDs, two data DVDs with short films and a 200-page full-color book with texts, photographs, drawings and paintings. Neither the music nor any of the other works included in the box are available in digital format.