Tracking the Goddess

Voyage within the womb of history

Synopsis:

A charming voyage through the Mediterranean, amidst the past and the present, whose photographs, texts and illustrations, which are joined in a sort of travel card, lead us to the most symbolic places of the civilization of the Mother Goddess, in a search for our roots and a possible future.

Structure:

The archeologist Marija Gimbutas, who dedicated her life to the study of Ancient Europe, in her findings discovered traces of an extremely refined civilization born 25,000 years ago, featured by the lack of wars and by a remarkable cultural expansion. The absolute tie between human beings and Mother Earth, naturally celebrated in the female body and in the cult of the Great Goddess, gave way to such a sustainable society that it lasted around 20,000 years. This is the ancient culture that the Mediterranean people share: so embedded as to deeply influence the subsequent populations such as the Lycians, the Etruscans, the Berbers, whose echo still today strongly affects those who hear about it…

Tracking the Goddess tells us about the journey that has brought to the discovery of some important places of this ancient civilization: Çatalhöyük, in central Anatolia, considered by many to be the first metropolis in the world, where some of the most important evidence tied to the worshipping of the Great Goddess was found. The stupendous temples shaped like the body of a woman from Malta and Gozo built to welcome through their stones equinox and solstice; Simena, the enchanting Lycian matrifocal village of Turkey, which sank in the sea because of an earthquake and is still visible among the crystal water and Sejnane, the small Berber Tunisian village on the border with Algeria, where women create terracotta according to an ancient method and with decorations that recapture the symbols of the Goddess.

Reasons and aims:

What existed before a history made up of battles and violent changes in the scenery; before the division into separate units called families and the organization of society into hierarchies and groups of power, according to which we have modelled our idea of a civilization?

Perhaps the world was a community, where the abuse of power did not exist and where men and women shared power and a margin of action.

Through her studies, Marija Gimbutas shows us a new outlook from which we can observe the history of humanity, asking us to abandon our methods and look up from the narrow segment of history in which we live, to open ourselves to new possibilities and understand the concept of civilization itself.

This is what inspired Tracking the Goddess, a voyage in the womb of history, within space and time, to find that edge that joins our most ancient roots to the present.

Giuditta Pellegrini