Maerzwasser

This piece questions the entire relationship with nature that faces the challenges of environmental / climate change, with the preservation of balance, with the sharing of resources and wealth, and with female resilience.

In Anica Huck's re-elaboration, the scientific data joins the reinterpretation of local myths about water and the function of women who, like water, are told in these myths in an ambivalent and contradictory way, a source of life and a threat at the same time, mixing objectivity and beliefs. The starting and ending point of the performance will be the Marmolada glacier and the Corte Lucatello well in Venice.

The initial input for the performance is the fact that women around the world will spend 200 million collective hours each day collecting water. Bringing this data back to its origins, the artist refers to the tradition of collecting the so-called Maerzwasser (March water), understood in the nineteenth century as water that was obtained from the snow that had just melted in the month of March. This water was kept particularly long and was unlikely to deteriorate. The water was collected by young women and had to be transported in absolute silence so that its magical properties were not lost.

So, to reinterpret the German myth and bring attention to the statistical data, Anica Huck recovers water from the Marmolada ice and will bring it - in silence - to Venice, a symbolic place of the necessary and conflictual relationship with water.

During the life performance in Venice, the artist created an impossible storage / distribution system for March water. The act of filling small gelatin capsules with the March water represents a digestive process conducted outside the human body, whereby the remains of this work are a complement between beauty and decadence.