Mimicry and Mythology

Louis-Philippe Scoufaras worked on one part of his Trilogy of Terror in Budapest during an exchange program between Solitude and the JAK foundation. Márió Z. Nemes, a Hungarian poet and writer (known in Hungary as the »Pope of Horror«) and also a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude at the same time as Louis, initiated the exchange because Louis needed a realistic model of a baby for one of the three movies he was working on. Márió told Louis to have the baby made in Hungary in collaboration with a Hungarian artist he knew. Louis then moved to Budapest for two months, where he shot one of the three videos and had the artist produce the baby, which was subsequently used in a film shot in Regensburg/Germany. Márió wrote a poem in relation to Louis’ Trilogy of Terror. To thank Márió for all his support, Louis offered him a kiss of death.

Mimicry and Mythology

It’s noon over the I, or summer, the order of fruits, the silence of poppy seeds above every hill. A calling, Echo calls, but it isn’t a voice, not a voice response, you have no luck, no one’s calling. The practisers of mimicry try to get near to the I, seducing it with amnesiac honey, in dreams such as this, the I couldn’t find something similar to itself, and this is the substance of seduction. No one’s calling, or rather the geology under the I is calling you, which is not history, it’s more like forgetting about history, the promise of The Great Pan.

It is copulation. The central motif of conspiracy. You, Earth, Clouds, Sea, around your shoulders, screaming for procreation, the wish in your palm, so that the world could tear pieces of its body just for you, forming them and lost in them deeply, with every poverty and shame of loneliness. The most tragic thing about the Great Pan is not the fact that it’s dead, but that it’s very much alive, and it’s not Pan really, but something completely different. Some kind of beauty that is the beginning of alienness, and the true face of fineness, that is not a voice, and not a voice response, after all no one called it.

Then: the sigh of a tree over the eyelid. Then cooing, then: you’re watching yourself among the asphodels in the water of the Styx. These are the sign-chains of cover-motifs. The antiquities: mimicry. The revenge of the matter is the real force that infects the sets of the shepherd games. We are there in the grove, standing in the Styx to the collar, if only we could copulate with a billy goat, with our animal form, how homy would it be between the asphodels. Instead, we are fucking the matter, back and forth without end, until it reaches the edge of nothingness, then it looks back at us, just to make fun of us. This grimace, this is The Great Pan.

Translated by Zoltán Komor