A Pine with Six Hands (performance)

Liliana Piskorska

Extract

On a broad stretch of lowlands striated by the blue threads of rivers, there was a city all in gold. And in the city, there was a hill of piled up rubble, and on the hill there grew a pine, and on the pine there were six hands.

And the hill is immense, the top invisible behind the clouds; it rises sharply into the sky, and on all its slopes, there is a black forest. Huge oaks, pines, beeches, firs – one growing upon the others. A tree jutting over another tree, higher and higher. Between them, on the ground, a thicket of thorns, hawthorn and poisonous herbs. A rubble of huge rocks, all green with wet moss, and among them – the pine. She stands tall and has six branches like six green hands, and one of them strange, magical.

The forest differs in no respect from a thousand others, on other hills across the world. And the pine seems the same, no different from a thousand other pines.

From the very top of the hill you can see the entire horizon of the land – mountains, fields, forests, and waters. Villages, great ironworks, houses, factories, and little towns. So many that you cannot count them all. And they lie like a painted picture, so marvelous that you could look at it for a hundred years and still not have enough.

The dawn was rising.

Keywords: art performance