BERLIN ART WEEK
MAHALLA
Lunar Pareidolia
bERLIN gERMANY 2024
A Walk in the Park
Curated by Ralph Schmerberg at Mahalla, Berlin Art Week
Lunar Pareidolia
The Moon has long served as a mirror for the irrational, a surface onto which we project the hidden architectures of our inner worlds. Seen only ever in profile its far side veiled from view it becomes a potent metaphor for the unconscious, for the strange logic that pulses beneath waking life.
‘Lunar pareidolia’ refers to the tendency to perceive familiar forms within ambiguity: faces in clouds, animals on the lunar surface. It is a psychological phenomenon, but also a poetic one where meaning insists on itself, even within abstraction. In this reading, the Moon becomes not just a celestial body but a canvas for collective dreamwork.
Everything Grows Towards the Sun
Across time and cosmology, the act of ingesting the divine whether through ritual, plant, or fungus has served as a passageway to other realms. In ancient and still-practiced traditions, consuming the ‘flesh of the gods’ enables communion with ancestral intelligence, particularly that held within the forest.
The mycelial network, vast and interwoven, holds memory across generations. It speaks through its fruiting bodies, mushrooms laced with psilocybin transmitting knowledge accumulated over millennia. In this cosmology, the forest is not a passive backdrop but a living archive, and the psychedelic encounter is an act of deep listening, of remembering what the earth already knows.