International Year Of Polytheism: Free Bariumnitrate

monochrom’s latest project, International Year Of Polytheism, kicked off on Saturday with “Free Bariumnitrate”, where 10,000 sparklers together and ignited all at once at Austria’s Symposion Lindabrunn.

The chemical compound Barium Nitrate is the basic ingredient for so called “sparklers”. Sparklers are bound to various monotheistic rituals, making them, in a certain sense, unfree.

In Austria for example, they play an important role in the local Christmas celebrations, an event celebrating the birth of the supposed son of god, Jesus Christ.

In Great Britain sparklers are used to celebrate the defeat of Guy Fawkes and a Roman Catholic attempt (1605) on the life of the King as representative of the Anglican Church.

In the USA they belong to the ritual celebration of the 4th of July, a holiday in which a seemingly secular nation religiously celebrates the metaphysical establishment of their role in the judaeo-christian value system.

Barium Nitrate thus stands as a representative of all symbols that have been enslaved and abused by the monotheistic world religions.

Check out Jacob Appelbaum’s amazing photos of this awesome pyrotechnic display.

There’s some great video as well.

The “International Year Of Polytheism” (powered by monochrom) wants to overcome the epoch of the monotheistic worldviews (and its derivatives such as “The West” and “The Arab World”) through the reconstruction of a polytheistic multiplicity in which countless gods and goddesses will eventually neutralize each other. Polytheism is democracy, Monotheism a dictatorship, even in its pseudo-secular form.

photos by Jacob Appelbaum