Lithuanian artist Arturas Raila has now been carrying out his project in progress entitled “The Power of the Earth” for two years, in collaboration with the geo-energy experts Vaclovas Mikailionis and Villius Gibavicius. The artist and the scientists come from rural areas of Lithuania, where they are leading representatives of a folklorist understanding of nature. This involves the matter-of-fact practice of traditional customs, e.g. the integration of the divining rod into contemporary contexts. Mikailionis and Gibavicius possess the special – as many see it almost supernatural – gift of being able to trace and map out the energy sources in their environment. Repeatedly, Arturas Raila has captured the diviners’ work in photographs, whereby he always adopts the neutral position of the ethnographic observer with regard to this process, which meets with some scientific scepticism.
Starting out from the assumption that every place on earth displays unique geo-energetic forces, Arturas Raila has now investigated the geo-energy currents in Berlin’s inner city with the aid of the two experts, and has produced an “Energy Map” showing the course of geo-energetic currents in the form of lines – so-called “ley lines” or “force lines”. On a large-format map, Raila presents visitors to Studio 3 with the smallest grid-network of “ley lines” in the centre of Berlin, which extends roughly from the Victory Column and Nikolaikirche/Unter den Linden to Kreuzberg/Victoria Monument.
