Tear My Heart Out '18/'19

“The earliest written record of tears is found on Canaanite clay tablets dating from the fourteenth century B.C. Named after the village in northwestern Syria where they were found by archaeologists, the Ras Shamra Texts are a series of clay tablets and fragments of tablets from the ancient city of Ugarit, which was destroyed by an earthquake in the early thirteenth century B.C. The tablets found in the ensuing excavations contain a narrative poem about the death of Ba'al, an earth god worshiped by several ancient Middle Eastern cultures. One of the fragments tells the story of the virgin goddess Anat, the sister of Ba'al, as she hears the news of his death. Quite naturally, she weeps at the news. The accepted scholarly translation is that Anat "continued sating herself with weeping, to drink tears like wine." This, the earliest mention of tears in history, suggests that they are induced by grief, and that they offer satiety, even a kind of intoxication. Hvidberg, the scholar who produced this translation, argues that this version of the story of Ba'al and Anat is related to a ritual of laughing and weeping in ancient pre-Hebrew Canaan, traces of which show up in the Hebrew Bible and a number of other sources. In this springtime ritual, a whole tribe would remove themselves to the desert and together begin to slowly moan and cry, moving from whimpering to weeping to wailing and then, over the course of several days, to frenzied hysterics and finally to laughing exhilaration before dissolving into giggles and resuming everyday life. In these rituals, frantic crying and raucous laughter are not opposed emotional displays but part of a continuum, a continuum based on a belief in emotional expression as a source of fundamental pleasure and social cohesion.” 

TEAR MY HEART OUT is our latest work- in- progress and speaks to the tragic comedy of the human being as plays out multiple roles in an attempt to maintain his perpetual state of separation from the world around him.
We ask what would happen if this perpetual state began to melt, just like a giant iceberg? If the world began to cry us?............And maybe it is...




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