TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Rituals are undergoing constant evolution, as they keep adjusting to environment and society of each epoch. Importantly, today`s artistic processes are manifestations of contemporary ritual culture. Media plays the key role in accommodating rituals, and if in the antient times we spoke of elemental media like water, fire, air etc.; today similar role is played by contemporary media, among which are internet, art objects, performances, moving images. A number of ethnographers and media scholars argue that contemporary media, both digital and analogue, replace natural elements utilized by antient ritualistic practices. We utilize media as a transmitter of ideas, emotions, and as a storage for meaning.

In addition to the mainstream theory by Durkheim explaining ritual`s main objective as to strengthen social bonds between members of a society, we see ritual as performing more functions: anxiety relief, identity building, memory conservation, rite of passage, empathy

strengthening, communicating emotions and experience, processing loss, myth building and rebuilding. Artistic practices acting as new rituals are aimed to mediate most difficult human feelings as terror, pain, grief. Researchers highlight special importance of these processes in today`s world.

We analyze reenactment as a ritualistic practice which is evoked by a deep-seated societal desire to not just repeat and memorize the past, transmitting the experienced history between members of community, but also to ‘change’ the past. We argue that re-experiencing past and even shifting its perception becomes possible by means of ritualistic practice. The transitions rituals undergo, and as a result, transformations in meaning, together with changes in collective memory happen because of evolution through multiple reenactments.