Mehtap Baydu, Wishing-stone
These “wishing-stones” sent by women from different cultures and different countries will be displayed in their integrity and in solidarity with the hidden wishes they carry.
The performance is connected to a ritual in which I had the chance to participate as a child, but remember only in part. Kurdish women go on journeys and try to make their wishes come true by repeatedly dropping a small stone on the steep surface of a large stone, hoping, against all odds, that their stone will stick to the large surface of the other. Often referred to as “visits”, these pilgrimage sites are mostly found in nature, such as the source of a river, a rock, a tree, a hill, or a pile of stones on a plain.
My child’s mind was puzzled at that time by the wishes, and by the fact that the women had difficulty expressing them and would rather confide them to a stone than share them with their families. However, this ritual was also an indication that women could not reveal their wishes, as the society in which they lived was unwilling, or unable, to meet their aspirations.
The memory of this ritual which I had witnessed as a little girl and which I would sometimes say had been just a dream, created the need to revive it as a tribute to women’s desires and expectations which, although expressed more openly today, remain unfulfilled.
Where there’s a WISH there’s hope!