Shattered Worlds / LSD

Several curious anecdotes surround the renowned French philosopher Michel Foucault. His LSD trip in Death Valley, California, is legendary: one weekend in 1975, he accepted an invitation from Assistant Professor Simeon Wade. It has now been definitively established that this is no legend. Moreover, this LSD trip profoundly altered Foucault's life and thought.

In "Hofmann in Death Valley," the Swiss filmmaker Leo Dick explores this LSD trip. Why Hofmann? Because Albert Hofmann experimented with the substance in Basel starting in 1938 and discovered its hallucinogenic effects in 1943 – during a legendary self-experiment. It went down in history as "Bicycle Day." Riding home on a bicycle, accompanied by his assistant, he experienced the full effects of the drug.

Dick musically takes up the kaleidoscopic interplay of color and form described by Hofmann. Expanded perceptions with unprecedented explosive power also revolve around Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Olivier Messiaen. When the Icelandic composer creates music, she often makes drawings to capture soundscapes, as in "Archora" from 2022. The title refers to the Greek terms for primordial being and space.

It is a primal energy that Thorvaldsdottir unfolds in space in a multifaceted and multicolored way – floating and mysterious. A synesthetic perception of sound, color, and rhythm was also something Messiaen had in mind. The French grand master of modernism subjects these elements to a virtually inexhaustible process of transformation. In "Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum" from 1964/65, the shattered worlds are to be taken literally, for the work commemorates the dead of both world wars.

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