Afraid of our own Shadows explores the way in which humanity can lose its bearings. The exhibition is a collaboration between four artists, a poet, artist, animator and musician/sculptor, in the spirit of dialogical art, as envisaged by Mikhael Bakhtin and Paulo Freire, allowing for new ideas to build around the theme.

The exhibition consists of a cycle of poems and pictures, responding to the witch hunts across Europe and North America in early modern times. The images have then been animated, with voiceover and sound effects.

At the core of the exhibition, there are the voices of the those involved – those accused of witchcraft, the accusers, the small number who expressed opposition, and the ordinary folk who were swept along by the mania.

While the exhibition takes a historical phenomenon as its theme, there  are allusions to disturbing echoes in our own. Those identified as ‘witches’ represent all who are different, both incomers from other cultures and those from within who do not conform to expected norms. If we fail to recognise that, we are condemned to watch the same narrative repeat itself time and again. The choice is ours: whether to be bystanders observing atrocities perpetrated by others or to stand together in opposition to irrational hatred of the Other.

Montaigne, who described himself as ‘an accidental philosopher’, summed up his scepticism about witch trials in his Essays in the following way: It is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to roast someone alive on their account. It is as relevant for those who would set alight buildings in which humans from other cultural backgrounds  are living as it was for those who would light the fires to burn witches four or five centuries ago. there lurked the tattered remnants of these older spirits.

The website is going to be updated on a regular basis with more content being added. In particular animations.