Skull Portraits: inside the studio and Forgotten Rituals

Deep in the Hirschberg forest, Germany, a wooden cross stands on the site of former witch trial executions. Lotte did a channeling and received surprising messages.

Deep in the Hirschberg forest near Warstein, Germany, a wooden cross stands on the site of former executions. Erected in 1986, it marks the place where, more than 300 years ago, dozens of people accused of witchcraft were tortured and killed.

History tells us that Hirschberg endured three waves of witch trials: around 1595, again in 1616–1617, and finally in 1628–1629. About 25 souls were condemned in total—forced under torture to confess, then silenced by rope and fire. For centuries, these events remained shrouded in taboo and silence, spoken of rarely, remembered even less.

Can a skull be the most intimate portrait of a person?

In this video, we take you inside the studio of Maison Douce and into the making of The Cranium Archive — an ongoing series about skulls, memory, inner portraiture, ritual, and the strange tenderness of death.

You can see behind-the-scenes footage from our artistic process: studio moments, interview fragments, research material, travel impressions, and the slow transformation of raw material into sculptures, banners, figures, and ritual images.

One of the inspirations behind this work is the cult of the anime pezzentelle in Naples, Italy — the “poor souls” of the forgotten dead. In places such as the Fontanelle Cemetery and the church of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco, anonymous skulls were once adopted by the living, often by women. They were cleaned, named, decorated, and prayed for — and, in return, were believed to answer through dreams, protection, or favors. For Maison Douce, this ritual is a powerful image of exchange. The forgotten receive attention, tenderness, names, and care. In return, they may offer meaning, orientation, or unexpected reward. It is a folk practice of memory and intimacy — a negotiation with the invisible.

Our work explores the archaic roots of art and the possibility of reconnecting artistic expression with the sacred. We draw from mythology, Catholic folk devotion, dream imagery, occult traditions, and forgotten histories that still seem to speak beneath the surface of contemporary life.

We create needle-felted sculptures by working loose wool fibers with barbed needles until soft matter slowly condenses into form. Skulls, saints, masks, and sculptures emerge from wool. The process is slow, tactile, and almost ritual. There is an uncanny tenderness in the material. Wool can feel innocent, domestic, even childlike — yet here it carries images of death, devotion, transformation, and memory. Through softness, the skull becomes touchable. The symbol becomes intimate.

At the center of the video is The Cranium Archive – an artistic investigation into the skull as the most intimate form of portraiture. A portrait without surface. A catalogue of inner beauty. A system of images in which expression, performance, and social identity are stripped away. What remains is structure: memory, projection, intention, psychic residue.

In religious and mythological traditions, the skull often appears as more than a symbol of mortality. It can become a vessel of consciousness, dream, voice, and presence — a place where something of the self remains after the face has disappeared.

With our Inner Portrait service, Maison Douce creates a portrait of you as a skull: a personal cranium artwork that becomes part of this living archive.

Would you dare to see yourself truly?

For Maison Douce, silence itself is material. Our work does not seek to “correct” history, nor to ease inherited guilt. Instead, we approach these charged sites as places where silence, shame, and memory live in the air. By performing rituals of channeling, we open ourselves to what is left behind: fragments of voices, atmospheres, echoes that resist erasure.

Channeling, for us, is both a practice and a performance. It is a way of listening differently—of stepping aside to let another voice come through. Sometimes these voices emerge as whispers, sometimes as full speech, sometimes as sound or song. We never fully know what will happen; each performance is a negotiation between body, place, and something beyond language.

At Hirschberg, this unpredictability became central. Unlike our first ritual at the Witch Tower in Rüthen, where the channeling unfolded in English, here the forest demanded something else. As Lotte sat on the ground, the voice emerged in German—her mother tongue, the language of the land, the tongue of both accusers and accused. This shift was not planned; it arrived with a force that made the ritual feel more immediate, raw, and intimate.

The performance was filmed as part of our ongoing exploration of memory and ritual. It is subtitled in English, but the German voice remains at its core—untranslatable in its intensity, carrying the weight of history and the heaviness of silence.

This work is not about reconciliation. It is about contact. It is about allowing space for what has been buried to rise again, if only for a moment, and to meet it with presence rather than avoidance. Through ritual, we aim to reclaim agency for those whose voices were stolen, while also breaking the generational silence that lingers around these histories.

We invite you to watch, to listen, and to sit with the uncomfortable intensity of what emerges when silence is broken.