Sybille

Sybille, the second performance co-created by Romeu Runa and Berlinde De Bruyckere, is closely connected to her works with casts of animal skins. This project was inspired by the artist’s influential encounter with a skin trader’s workshop in Anderlecht, Brussels, in 2014, where freshly flayed animal skins are cleaned and salted for preservation before being shipped to tanneries. In an effort to not merely relate to the sculptures but to truly grasp the profound impact of this experience, Runa visited the skin traders in Anderlecht. “I watched the ritual of the workers salting the skins while piling them up on the plinths and I saw the reaction of the skins to the salt: they tightened, holding on even stronger to each other, with the salt as an element of bonding, of connection, of a need to purify and unify something as powerful as those skins. This is where I started to project my body, my skin onto this element; my body as a vehicle to the salt, because in the end, the salt is the performance. It’s the primal matter that influences everything I do. It enters every pore, every hole of my body, clogging my eyes until I have to close them. I imagine this is what the skins in Anderlecht are doing: they are closing their eyes.” Amongst numerous other associations, Runa connected this experience to another of Ovid’s myths, the story of Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl, who traded her virginity for the gift of eternal life, or for as many years as the grains of sand she held in her hand.