Mundus Imaginalis

Berenike Corcuera

“Mundus Imaginalis” is a collection of textile artworks in which Berenike explores a world situated between the natural and the spiritual. A world that mediates between sensory reality and the mystical realm of the divine.

In this in-between world, Berenike embraces the power of imagination and allows cognitive imagination to flourish. Within this imagination, a form of quantum logic, she examines fragments from past dreamscapes, sensory perception, and divination using natural elements such as animal and plant ostents, deliberate experiments with water crystallography, and also explores the realm of sorrow, hope, and the afterlife.

 In his 1964 text, ‘Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,’ the late Islamic scholar Henri Corbin argues that 'the imagination is far from being unreal or non-existent; on the contrary, it establishes real imaginative knowledge and function.' It is not based on a separation of matter and spirit, history and myth, because the ‘true’—a concrete location—resides in the soul, and the physical exists within the spiritual.”