About
SAVAGIST is an artist living and working in the Alpine foothills of Southern Germany and the Apennine mountains of Central Italy.
The main body of his work comprises multi-species art performances taking place in difficult to access wilderness regions. SAVAGIST's performance art offers unique perspectives on the natural world and invites us to rethink the relationship of modern man and nature.
Oftentimes SAVAGIST tries to contrast civilized existance and pre-historic life within his art. He draws his inspiration from different European cultures of the Paleolithic age and ancient Italian and Bavarian customs. Interesting for him is the attempt to translate these concepts into the here and now. Place and origin are important elements of his work, but SAVAGIST tries to extend these site-specific aspects to global spread contemporary discourses. His art is therefore rooted in very specific places, but strives at the same time for a certain universality – always looking for answers to the primary question: What does it mean to be a human (animal) on this planet while living embedded in complex environments and interacting with a multitude of other life forms in a time of global transformation? By fusing elements of stone age hunter-gatherer tribes with modern “civilized” culture he creates his vision of a ‘‘contemporary/future primitive’’ - while giving the word ‘‘primitive‘‘ a positive connotation.
“Urgent appeals to upend history, to change situations from negative to positive, can best be articulated in all their complexity through live performance, in scenes that confront the underlying mercilessness of real events. For it is the license to draw on a range of media without restriction that allows artists to rearrange the facts, to imagine reconciliation, to create poetic spaces for personal visions, cultures and rituals.“ (Goldberg 2018, p. 112-113)
SAVAGIST's multispecies art performances could be described as such rituals. They are multifaceted attempts to rediscover the animal within our human selves.
In 2024, the artist, who has been active for over a decade, decided to show his works to the general public for the first time. He is currently working on further projects.
Mosseater - Mistweaver, 2015