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Claudia Terstappen is seduced by rituals and magical practices. In her photographs she looks at temples, shrines and the objects used in ceremonial practices; she also explores the concept of the spirit of place that is the foundation of many indigenous cultures.1
Terstappen is interested in belief and hope, and she wants to know how the shaman heals and what this means for the ways in which the human mind and spirit work. But this is not a new age encounter with the spiritualities of others, it is more an investigation of hopes and promises and how these are delivered by abstract languages like ritual and prayer. In times of crisis when governments and societies fail, people, often en masse, turn to their gods, their spirits, their shamans and their magical practices to regain a sense of place and security. Terstappen wants to know how this works.
When I probed the artist about what she believed, she quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein to me, she said: ‘We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all’.2
It is intriguing that an artist taking photographs of sacred sites and places of worship would be interested in someone like Wittgenstein. He was, after all, a logical positivist and associated with the Vienna Circle of the 1920s which rejected metaphysics and theology. Wittgenstein meditated on the nature of language, how language works, he probed language games as a linguistic philosopher and concluded that the puzzle of philosophy grew out of a misunderstanding of how language operates.3
At first this language of the rational seems far away from the monumental... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline