MAKA WAKAN
(Sioux)

Across all of the EARTH's continents, I have worked together with many indigenous people on many Earth Art Projects. I have met people who understand that the EARTH is our mother and our home.

Through a personal contact in summer 2015 I was able to realize a Terragraphy project with the SIOUX people in the heart of their land around the Black Hills. With people whose lives, culture and fate have interested and fascinated me since my childhood. Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe in the 19th generation, gave me his blessing for the project.

Together with the medicine man Jim Miller Ironcloud from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation I coul collected SOIL in North und South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana und Wyoming. I dug the SOIL from significant sites which have been holy to the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Cheyenne and other Plains Indian Tribes since primeval times, from historical places intertwined with the SIOUX’s fate and from places illustrating the lifestyle of the SIOUX today. The precise selection of these sites was determined through one of the Seven Holy Rituals of the Lakota in the Sweat of Jim Miller.

The EARTH ART WORKS produced by the end of 2015 tell of the exceptional spirituality and culture of these people, which in turn inspired me to paint underneath some of the EARTH ART WORKS with SOIL.