Æther – Chapters O & I
Æther is an audio-visual collaboration between Evelyn Bencicova and Samson G Balfour Smith. The project develops a narrative in the 3D realm through body, voice, sound, space and movement. At IPMA 2026, two chapters of the project are presented: Chapter O and Chapter I.
Chapter O stands for an opening and re-translates the Genesis story. The artists examine how inherited myths can shape culture, identity and social assumptions, particularly when curiosity and disobedience attributed to a female figure become grounds for guilt. The work returns to earlier meanings of symbols later incorporated into Genesis, including the tree of life and knowledge and the serpent. Adam is associated with earth and humanity, Eve with life, eating with perceiving, fruit with information, and the serpent with the layered idea of pharmakon – both poison and cure. The fall from the guided garden becomes a process of consciousness and self-knowledge, while Eve moves from the burden of sin and shame into the position of protagonist.
Chapter I stands for separation, while also considering the possibility of re-membering and reconnecting with an origin. Earth appears as an animate, shape-shifting form speaking of the divide between humanity and the divine. The chapter draws on early societies and beliefs in which female or androgynous deities were understood as creators and as representations of soil, elements and cosmos. It also reflects on a shift from cyclical and egalitarian ways of seeing towards a vertical, hierarchical and anthropocentric worldview, and on the gradual separation of people from their environment and from one another.
Chronologically, Chapter I precedes Chapter O, reaching back to a time before the writing of Genesis. Together, the two films form a continuing Æther narrative about separation, consciousness, inherited stories and the possibility of reconnection.