Preload-Honf and night & day

After becoming acquainted with the House of Natural Fiber (HONF) during the cellsbutton#3 media arts festival, and hearing that the group had members coming through singapore, I wanted to make a local connection for the group with the downtown venue Night&Day. On friday, August 28 members of HONF and international artists Marko Batista and Tengal Drilon performed within the bar sapce of Night&Day to an intimate crowd of academics and artists. Kelley was gracious and gave her space for the session, and the HONF team now have made an excellent connection in the city.

Tengal performed solo and also collaborated in an improvisational duet with my video. His spontaneous piano and sound performance had a fascinating effect on the video pieces, changing meaning and emotion. This type of collaboration is an area to further explore.

Marko Bastisto. video and sound

Taishan Red

astrid almkhlaafy

My explorations to Thailand, Borobudur and Angkor Wat fueled on my interest in mountains. The DNA of Singapore also pulled me to China, so in the tradition of the pilgrimage — in Chinese “ch' ao-shan chin-hsian”g – or 'paying one's respect to a mountain' — with the intent of better understanding some of the cultural roots of this new home, I proposed and received a grant to research, visit, climb, document and finally exhibit my findings of the pilgrimages to Mount Tai Shan and Mount Hua Shan in China. This is a report in progress.

You must ascend a mountain
to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body,
for it is at home there,
though you are not.

Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 6

In July we went to Shandong province in China to climb Taishan. To pay respect to this mountain and the pilgrimage we walked, documented and mapped with GPS...all the while wearing red. In effect, we painted Taishan red by walking everywhere in red. This action made manifest the pilgrimage itself, while also conceptually conjuring up an umbilical cord, or a red bloodline.


The son of the sun
Taishan is red. it's the color of the calligraphy, the stone carving, the wish trees, the temples. From the summit, Mao claimed "From here, all of China is Red". Taishan is blood. It is the bloodline, it is the male bloodline. It is also birth, it is the east, it is mythologically from where life began.You could say that Taishan is the linga of China. It is where sons come from and where the sun first rises. It is an incredibly complex site.



So with my collaborators, we considered these thoughts and more. As women, we were most curious about gender. So many women have climbed over so many centuries to pray for male offspring. And to a goddess they prayed. How did a goddess land the top of Taishan? Taoism usually puts the female at the ground level and the male towards the sky. How did a female deity get to reign supreme with a temple at the top of a linga?


Bixia Yuanjin (pronounced BEE-cha you-on-JEEN) is the Chinese Taoist Goddess of the dawn, childbirth, and destiny. As Goddess of dawn, she attends the birth of each new day from her home high in the clouds. As Goddess of childbirth, she attends the birth of children, fixing their destiny and bringing good fortune. Dawn and childbirth are two concepts often, and quite understandably, linked in world mythology: the rising of the sun, the bringing of light to the earth, is equated with the child emerging from the darkness of the womb to the light of the world.

Tai'an City is a stretch of ancient and mystical land. Five thousand years ago here originated the brilliant Dawenkou Culture, which reflects the whole course of the transition from matriarchal society to patriarchal society and the disintegration of the primitive society.
www.asia-planet.net/china/taian.htm

While on pilgrimage, women enjoyed a degree of freedom from some of the restrictions of their daily life. They were able to travel beyond their local area, they stayed overnight outside their own home, and they met people from other regions. Although women customarily played a minor role in rituals, they were the primary or sole actors in rituals associated with the Goddess of Mount Tai (Taishan Niangniang 泰山娘娘 or Bixia Yuan-jun 碧霞元君). In addition to physical mobility, pilgrimages allowed women to exercise ritual authority and agency and to establish new identities as mothers and ritual experts.
Brian Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China

Over the week that we were at the mountain we climbed altogether over 8 times. Sometimes as a group, other times solo. Most often in red. When not in red we were documenting and interviewing over a hundred pilgrims. On the final day we performed an 'ode to the pilgrimage' at the base of the mountain, outside the temple to Bixia.


In the way
The most important 'performance' piece was at the top, leading up to the gate of heaven, here is where every pilgrim passes up to the summit. At this location, i walked zig-zag down, along every step, passing by everyone walking up, being in the way of the way. This was documented with gps, video and photography as well.

In a time where we are most often in urban settings, focused on screens, communicating virtually, it is easy to forget that the grand events of the past have often been on foot, up mountains, with strangers, to pray. On a meta level, I hope that by embarking on these pilgrimages, documenting the journeys, researching and studying the locations and finally exhibiting and sharing my findings that somehow the content will inspire others to explore heritage sites and become inspired by historical and cultural wonders.

The foot of the heavenly ladder, which we have got to mount in order to reach the higher regions, has to be fixed firmly in every-day life, so that everybody may be able to climb up it along with us. When people then find that they have got climbed up higher and higher into a marvelous, magical world, they will feel that that realm, too, belongs to their ordinary, every-day life, and is, merely, the wonderful and most glorious part thereof.
— E.T.A.W. Hoffmann, The Serapion Brethren. B, vol. II, sect. 5 (1892).

So far this has been partially exhibited in Tokyo and most recently in the 2008 Fall International Digital Design Invitation Exhibit, South Korea.

GPS poetry — ISEA exhibition

While learning about the creative possibilities of my Garmin GPS I began to experiment. I wanted to write big messages and began immediately after the desired technology caught up to my ideas. For my first experiment I created an alphabet along the beach in Krabi, Thailand. Halfway through I realized it was backwards. The scale was enormous but not a typeface I wanted to continue in Illustrator.

What I gleaned from this was the tide and the topography affect the ability to carry out the task. These are walked, I mean, I walk up and down and back and forth on the beach, imagining what the letter will look like from a plane above. It's pretty amusing to the people sitting and relaxing at the beach bars. I was asked if I was treasure hunting, lost, in need of help—when i answered that i was writing it really made for instant conversations with very curious questions. After the slightly successful alphabet, i moved on to bigger and grander ideas. I had a quote that i wanted to write along the other side of the beach, ideal for the location, so it became a site specific piece of walked poetry:

May the tide be soon enough on high to keep our abstract verse from being dry

— Robert Frost, Etherealizing.

When viewed in google earth the quote is often shown with the tide in, and so the abstract verse is rarely dry. When written, the descenders of the ‘y’, ‘g’ & ‘p’ touched the water. The reaction of onlookers was never dry, nor the intention of the project, and so the walk (over 10km) physically expressed the location, the quotation and used the technology in an unconventional yet clear way.

I also discovered en route that script was far easier to walk than a serif or sans serif typeface. since my track was always being recorded i could relax in general within one word. when it came to word spacing i leapt quickly (since there is a time factor in this process of being recorded) to the next word. in general the legibility of this improved dramatically.

The next location was in Bintan, Indonesia. I researched the location and was really drawn to the historical drama of the Sultan of Malacca (Malaysia), Mahmud Shah, who fled the Portuguese and escaped to Bintan, bringing with him Islam to Indonesia. The survival and adaptability of a man, who was probably one of the richest on the planet in his day—the kind of the spice trade route—really intrigued me. He lives on through the religion, Indonesia has the largest Muslim population on the planet. That combined with the nature of this kind of writing, and the gorgeous location (we were staying in a resort on the island) led to this quote (roughly of the same period):

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him order the architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man’s knowledge, not according to his own.

— Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) “Of Practice,” The Essays (Les Essais), bk. II, ch. 6, Abel Langelier, Paris (1595).

This led to another 'walked thought' based on my experiences in Angkor Wat. Angkor is extraordinary. but it is also so incredibly fragile, Siem Reap depending so heavily on it's past for basic survival now. I was overwhelmed by the scale of the space, and by the ruins of boulders tumbling down everywhere. I'd also spent a day exploring Tonlé Sap which geographically explained the location of the Angor ruins, such a futile source of nourishment, but today surrounded by impoverished communities dependent on weather and tourism. I hired a boat and explored the floating villages of Vietnamese and Cham communities and this influenced my quote:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: “What the Thunder Said”

I had spent three days already exploring the site and found only one location possible for walking type. It was along the edge of the eastern baray leading up to the Bayon. This was my first attempt at writing on soil: dusty dry, weedy. I imagined that it was once water, or along the shore of the artificial lake. In reality I ended up bumping into a tuk tuk parking area and had to write and navigate the word 'ruins' around the crowd. it was not easy, and that made the quote feel even more appropriate.

"these fragments"

I like the way i can merge my love for walking and reading and archaeology and poetics into a space. I also enjoy the invisibility of the message. I know what I'm doing, but no one else has a clue. There is so much potential in that. Peace signs in war zones, poison signs in toxic waste lands. it's an open palette.

Through these experiments I was asked to show at last year's ISEA conference here in Singapore. I met some fascinating people, Ema Ota of Dislocate Tokyo was one I'd like to show with in the future.

isea exhibition — NTU, singapore 2008

translating — thoughts on the nature of the designer

Call it what you will, translation, solution, answer, gift: the role of the designer is to take what exists and reintroduce by making fresh connections to a new, often specific audience. We recycle culture. We archive, search, research, collect, deconstruct and re-present. It is the nature of making meaning. And so our role is not so different from that of an archaeologist. The archaeologist sifts, sorts, categorizes, connects, and re-introduces something that exists or has existed to a waiting audience. The archaeologist also must convince which again is a major role of the designer.

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

Edith Hamilton
Three Greek Plays, introduction (1937)

The difference seems to me to be that designers are creative archaeologists. We sift through everything up to now, our past is the immediate. But we are free to connect and reassemble using everything from now on back in time. our work is montaging the past. we use letters, words, thoughts and ideas to create new messages or immediate messages. We use images and styles and photos and people. we are, like archaeologists, the sifters, collectors and keepers. It's an enormously important role. recycling. but what are the consequences? i mean in the long term?

how confusing for someone 2000 years from now to see the works of today. for how much of what we make is 'authentic'? from my hand? or yours? we mix time up in these doughs that then we reshape and re-present and they are so 'now'. but what is now other than a fusion of then or everything up to now? perhaps creative making is always this: reshaping the past, making meaning which is sometimes seen as 'new' but always a collection of old.

I think that's another reason why i prefer the live art aspect of creation. the immediacy doesn't make me ponder authenticity. there is no plagiarism in collective spontaneity. or is there?

The job to entice, surprise, engage, entertain, inform, persuade—in short, communicate with readers—has been the burden of the artist from Day 1.

Upper & Lower Case magazine
Jun 80

archaeology of festivity

Visual communication is a field that constantly expands and absorbs. This is the lure that brings in so many students and makers. We can self define as designers, and master areas that may seem left-field, only to find that those very 'esoteric' areas represent a core of what we call visual communication.

I came to graphic design from the past. the deep past, specializing in classical & near eastern archaeology. It was artifacts and pieces of extraordinary civilizations from before that grew this love of documentation. I mean, who are we if we leave nothing behind? What greater challenge than to preserve, package and save snippets of our cultures for an unknown future observer?

" 'No one,' Pascal once said, 'dies so poor that he does not leave something behind.'
Surely it is the same with memories too — although these do not
always find an heir."
— walter benjamin.

There is something of Mnemosyne in all this. Sure we may leave a footprint trail behind, but it will dry out with the time. it's only by being carved or made of stone, by being baked clay, by flukes of volcanic or natural fossil making quirks that things really get passed along down thousands and thousands of years. Our recent abilities to retell collective memories (oral traditions) have faded completely in most western communities. we rely on paper, electricity. Neither of which last long at all.

And yet there are festivals and they often DO connect back.

In Tokyo, I designed my way up from a production artist to an art director to a Media and Design Manager, and the big thing I worked around consistently, was events. promoting, staging, branding, and of course documenting. It was exciting. but my creativity wasn't pushed enough, nor my archaeology. I threw costume parties, followed matruris and in general tried to celebrate. But in the end grad school beckoned and I finally was able to fuse and focus.

I call it the archaeology of festivity. it's a field of research that explore feasts, festivals, processions, rituals — in general very ephemeral communication pieces — for the purpose of preservation, deconstruction, and translation.

This was my first attempt at defining the world I wanted to research. It's a book called Celebrate. It categorizes the universality of the celebration into 6 chapters. Fertility and Harvests, the Sacred, Mapping Power & the prince, the State, the Rebellious & the Personal Journey.


It was a first statement. An attempt to map out and present, to contextualize and declare that the immersive experience is ancient. It is part of our DNA. it is universal and it communicates. The festival/ritual/dance/procession/pilgrimage communicates. Each communicate culture, identity, history and self. As such they are living threads of the past. they are often 'alive' archaeology. They communicate through immersion through physically engaging the body. They are part of an area of the performance or communication world that I'm calling (at least here in this blog) 'physical communication'.

physical & visual communication

Not only did live art by artists represent the very spirit of its own times and reveal the ways in which artists from different disciplines interconnected, it also showed me how certain ideas in a painting or a sculpture, which as a traditional art historian I might have looked for in other paintings or sculptures, often originated in some sort of performed action. Indeed, the history of performance throughout the twentieth century showed performance to be an experimental laboratory for some of the most original and radical art forms; it was a freewheeling, permissive activity for intellectual and formalist excursions of all kinds that could, if studied carefully, reveal layers of meaning about art and artmaking that simply were not clear before.

—Roselee Goldberg, introduction
Performance, Live Art Since 1960

As designers we often create works that live through print or on screen. Part of the need to mass produce spurs this on, to communicate to large audiences. It is often part of our task. But living behind a screen can be isolating — and as communication people, a hunger grows to get out and meet the audience. It's often not possible with huge campaigns. It's often part of the PR and marketing team to handle those aspects. But creating a one way flow of information is almost like talking to yourself. Sometimes being in the moment with your audience, making your audience take part in the actual process of the design (or art) can lead to incredible insights while also allowing for a freedom of experimentation not allowed in a final polished thing.

Many creatives have recognized the potential of experimenting in real time. There is the cost and the immediacy as lures, there is also a sense of play and inclusiveness. Our audience is with us, our critics are our players. it can be immensely satisfying to have closure in a sense. of course these moments are experiments or sketches that do get translated. and the translations do go further to reach larger less local or immediate audiences. but during the actual creation and 'painting', we are engaged with others and communicating in real time, in the same space. it's almost rebellious, in the sense that so little is made this way today.

When i worked as a more traditional designer, I met with others within my office to discuss strategy, to report progress, to delegate duties and to present pitches. rarely did i include others in my making process, rather i showed and moved on to the next stage of implementation. I was lucky in that i did see my audience at times, and could get a sense of the reception of my work. Also working within events, i went and saw the events and documented them. But in those days, other than the costume parties I threw, making things for the audience to create wasn't really something possible. We made things for the audience to observe.

Part of my fascination with experiences, is that of the immersive possibilities. There is something about creating a communication piece that must be engaged in and made manifest through that engagement that is so full of potential. Say I want to communicate 'collaboration' — what better way than to get my audience to collaborate— to understand not only conceptually, but also physically. this is compelling.

I've looked deeply into the Futurists and Dadaists, into performances from the Surrealists and Constructivists to Black Mountain College and the Fluxus period, and they tap into this thing I'm drawn to, but I've found that i need to look further afield. And so Masturis and rituals, ceremonies and pilgrimages have been pulling my attention and absorbing my research time.

The concept of pulling a person totally into an experience to communicate to them is ancient. It's part of the core of Borobudur, of Angkor Wat and of mountains like Taishan. We must engage in the space to read and glean the meaning. the meaning is there, but not accessible from a distance. it requires pedestrian focus, you must walk to know. I love that concept.

Taiwan Ghost Festival — OISTAT 2008

OISTAT post workshop poster | that's me in black

Since coming to Singapore, and being back in the diverse and rich festival worlds of south east Asia and greater Asia, I've been on site researching and recording as much as possible. From August 13th (arrival) to 24th (departure), 2008. I was invited to join From Ritual to Theatre – Asian Ritual Festival Workshop, organized by OISTAT Secretariat and supported by Taiwanese Governments. The workshop took place during the Ghost Festival in Taiwan.The opportunity to work with theater people was a first, and housed within this the focus on ritual was extraordinarily ideal.


As one of the international artists, I was asked to present my work in order to be invited, and again, on the second day of the workshop, to the participants. The response to my own work was positive (being a visual communication I was nervous that my work would be too left field). But the live art and the intersection of performance with graphic design history, and my body of work in staging and documenting live art experiences, somehow connected well with the participants who were enthusiastic to collaborate They compared my most recent grant work at Taishan to Christo.


The workshop consisted of a two-day trip to visit the Ghost Festival ceremony in Keelung to observe the Taoist Shaman’s ritual performance, lantern pole erection, folk art parades and the “ water lantern releasing to the sea”. We also were guided through rituals like the “Grand Putu” as well as the Hakka Holy Boar Competition. In the workshop we were expected to share our observations and inspiration with the Taiwanese performing art professionals (directors, designers), as well as theatre apprentices/assistants who toured and worked with us. The intention of the workshop was to encourage intercultural exchange and dialogues based on the grass-roots culture and to transform the ritual into theatrical ideas.

Hakka Holy Boar Winner 2008
a boar, fed like a king for a year, then stretched out and painted and displayed for competition

It was expected that after breaking into smaller groups during the workshop, that we work intensively together in the conceptualization, making and staging of our projects on the final day of the workshop in the form of installations, story boards for a potential production, video/photo documentary and its transformation, design as performance, etc. My group consisted of one of the leading choreographers of Taiwan, Hsiao-Mei Ho—leader of Taipei Crossover Dance Company and Associate Professor of Dance Department of TNUA—and her four dance students, as well as Francis Shen—one of the top costume designers and also one of his students. We worked intensively and were able to bring our areas of interest together into a performance on the last night.

The mandala floor

My contribution was in the concept, the space, the stage design and the experience of the audience. I also staged a ritual using the paper money for the ghosts, which ended up becoming the floor for the audience. For an entire day i layout the papers one by one, into a perfect mandala like shape. It was exhausting. but somehow the absurdity of what i was doing (i had no idea what i was doing until i began and then i was too stubborn to quit) attracted the attention of nearly everyone, and the combination of these papers, the possible presence of ghosts, and my obstinacy in finishing it completely made the entire process elevate on it's own.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
— Napoleon Bonaparte

Somehow within this collaboration i was able to stay true to my own research and interests while working with 2 strong directors. It was incredibly satisfying.

The response to our collaboration was very positive and we are in the process of exploring how to make this into an actual performance in both Taiwan and Singapore. Hsiao-Mei Ho is looking into funding in Taiwan. Further development of works from the workshop has been strongly encouraged and OISTAT is hoping the works may be presented in future OISTAT events such as Scenofest, World Stage Design, or even end up as production in Taiwan.

kaleidoscope

One of the highlights of teaching here at ADM is the designed experiences course I get to lead every spring semester. It's a highly collaborative, experimental course that looks into the history of gatherings and allows for the students to come up with solutions that are performance based communication pieces. It's been a laboratory of experiments. We've scored, staged, documented and translated original works as well as actual festivals, like Chinese New Years.


Last year, as a warm up exercise I got the class to engage in an experience of my own. It was called kaleidoscope. I'd been teaching Graphic Design 4 at the same time, and was heavily into systems and time, and kept going back to the circle and it's metaphysical poetic nature (as a group experience). This led to a short study. The book became a study of beauty and form heavily leaning on Plato.


The great thing, is the video we worked on was invited and accepted into the MilkBar Festival.

Angkor Wat

“Mountains are cosmological symbols of the divine—human meeting, as well as the point of creation—creation of community as well as cosmos. Depending upon the era, culture, and text, the cosmological emphasis on the mountain might be one or more of the following: the assembly place of the gods, the connection between heaven and earth, the center/navel of the earth (and thus the locus of creation), the locus of revelation.” — Donaldson, Terence L., Jesus on the Mountain. A Study in Matthean Theology.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
— Chinese proverb.

From Borobudur, my research lead me to consider other locations dedicated to conveying religion through architecture and the pedestrian experience. Spaces that are associated with mountains, that are mystical, that have the power to draw crowds, and which were made for spiritual purposes and for the benefit of the pilgrim and to help in enlightenment.

“The mountains ... are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Angkor Wat was next. Obviously the mountain is embedded deeply in the architectural iconography. Mount Meru is conjured up as is the procession of a mandala, from the profane into the sacred. The fusion in south east Asia of animism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, into these shrines, temples, mandalas, and processions weaves history and culture and creativity together into living rites of passage that keep alive older pilgrimages and history and refer back in time to other spaces and countries. knowledge is stored in these paths, but reading is also untangling and sifting. the threads are so intertwined and complex.


Following on the footpath of research from Thailand’s Wat Tham Sua (Tiger Cave Temple) and the work into the Nalanda trail— the spread of Buddhism into south east Asia— while focusing on the walking experience as physical communication, and while continuing the mountain research from Sisyphus to Borobudur and the mythical Mount Meru, I spent a week in February 2008 GPS mapping and absorbing Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat, located at 13Δ˚24’45”N, 103˚52’0”E is a unique combination of the temple mountain, the standard design for the empire’s state temples, the later plan of concentric galleries, and influences from Orissa and the Chola of Tamil Nadu, India. The temple is a representation of Mount Meru, the home of the gods: the central quincunx of towers symbolises the five peaks of the mountain, and the walls and moat the surrounding mountain ranges and ocean.

The spaces however do not end as metaphors that are simply physical duplicates of a physical or mythical mountains, they also become representations of centers of the universe:


omphalos:
in Greek and Roman religion, navel-shaped stone used in the rites of many cults. The most famous omphalos was at Delphi; it was supposed to mark the center of the earth.” — The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.

“Along the southeast Asian peninsula, mountains were regarded as sacred territories as early as three thousand years ago. As sources of water, and therefore of agricultural fertility, mountains were the subject of reverence and ritual celebration. But as burial sites, these same mountains inspired ore profound questions of death, impermanence and the fragile balance between humankind and the forces which could destroy fields, crops, families, and on occasions, entire generations living in villages which were swept away by floods and landslides falling from neighboring slopes. Given this reverence in which mountains were perceived, ancient peninsula civilizations such as the Cambodian Funan people of the second century AD, enthroned their sovereigns and emperors on these mountain summits. Indeed, the word Funan can be translated as either Sacred Mountain, or King of the Mountains. Following the downfall of the Funan, the Khmer dynasty began to spread it’s civilization from Cambodia in the ninth century to govern most of southeast Asia over the next six hundred years.” — Adrian Cooper, Sacred Mountains, Ancient Wisdom and Modern Meaning.
The Khmer people continued to draw inspiration form local mountains, in fact building their cities and temples either with respect to the views, in alignment with, or in reference to local and mythological mountains. They too, called themselves kings of the mountain. By becoming the mountain, these rulers direct the gaze of their people. They are the center. Their capital and magnet. The man-made peaks beckon the faithful and center the pilgrims both to look inward — at their rulers and their monuments and their direct descent from mountains, and outward from a common home from where they go and return on longer pilgrimages. These metaphorical mountains, the palaces and temples of the mountain rulers of Angkor Wat, Burma, Java, and Bali give their visitors religion, history, culture, and guides towards spiritual attainment towards a larger pilgrimage of the life well lived as a Hindu or Buddhist. So the monuments are mountains of knowledge as well as physical metaphors for the mountains they represent. This is a universal metaphor:

“It was common in the ancient Near East to construct temples and altars with mountain symbolism.The religious center is thus accorded cosmic significance. That is, the mountain-temple or temple-mount—especially in the political capital—manifests a divine sanction, a sacral quality, and thus a relationship to the cosmos which other places do not possess. — Clements, R. E., God and Temple.

“Besides natural mountains, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the Canaanite temples were constructed as sacred meeting places between humans and the gods, as gateways to the heavens, as divine thrones, and likely also as altars: that is, locations for the enactment of ritual at or upon the axis mundi.Egyptian pyramids also bore this cosmological significance. In the inscriptions found in the pyramids of Mer-ne-Re and Nefer-ka-Re (both Sixth Dynasty, 24th century BCE), an analogy is made between the primeval hill that emerged from the watery chaos at creation and the building of the pyramid. — Wilson, John A., 1969 “Egyptian Myths, Tales, and Mortuary Texts.”

So in the manmade mountains we receive a sense of identity as far as group. we belong to a larger unit. and yet beyond the immediate connections to our community we also are guided through visual narratives along the designed pedestrian experience that allude to grander pilgrimages, meta journeys of life. Angkor Wat alludes to the Ramayana and Mount Meru and Mt Kailash. Borobodur to Mt Sumeru and the the way towards the life of a Buddha. These created axis mundi, mountain centers are centers and also guides. The pilgrim can then absorb the lessons and head north.

“And often, guarding and overlooking the man-made omphalos, generally to the north of it in the direction from which disruptive forces are traditionally supposed to emanate, is found a lone, conical mountain. It’s mythological prototype is the mountain at the centre of the world. The chief god of the pantheon resides there, presiding awesomely over the rituals in his sanctuary below. The traditional sacred landscape,
— John Mitchell, At the Center of the World, Polar Symbolism Discovered in Celtic, Norse and other Ritualized Landscapes

So when we seek a mountain, or enlightenment, as the Chinese like equate the two, we seek our own center. The pilgrim goes physically on a quest to a location that represents the center of a universe, the universe as a whole, but also the center of the pilgrim. By moving outward we somehow move inward. By seeking we see ourselves from a new perspective, and in many of the instances that have been examined, that persepctive is one of centering the pilgrim at the heart of the mandala. The axis mundi within.

There’s no Discouragement,
Shall make him once relent,
His first avow’d intent,
To be a Pilgrim.
— John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress.