Intermediaries (1)
Consisting of notes on direct and implicit forms of contact with God, a series of sculptures think through lived religious metaphysics and particular historical narratives. Central to the works are the writings of the North African theologian and philosopher, St.Augustine, and the French Christian mystic and philosopher, Simone Weil. The notion of metaxu (or intermediaries), for Weil, is that which both separates and connects. God is thus indirectly present in the world and intermediaries function as a connecting distance—a paradoxical point of communication (e.g., as a wall separates two prisoners in adjoining cellsbut can also be used to tap messages). In the works, traces of silent discourse remain on the groundsheet of a tent that separated humans from the soil underneath them, and on a set of blinds that separated humans from an external source of light. Delineating a section of the space is a written chronology which focuses on religious narratives within North and East Africa, from ancient history to late antiquity. The timeline forms an elliptical repository of narratives such as Asenath’s vision, the resurrection of Christ, the martyrdom of St. Perpetua, and the prayer of the Ethiopian Saint Iphigenia with the Apostle Matthew. The sculptural syntax of Intermediaries (1) gives form to ‘thoughts and remembrance’,drawing on the indexical properties of found materials and their traces of passing time. In Augustine’s Christian platonism, memory and anticipation can be forms of contact with God, whom he views as the origin and essence of our being. For Augustine, memory holds knowledge of this origin through our innate familiarity with notions of happiness, justice, beauty, and the good, which inform our desires and earthly conduct. Material traces of contact with clay soil could stir a longing to walk through a landscape, because there we once felt the immediacy of what we know to be beauty. This in turn could result in an anticipatory desire for contact with the essence of beauty itself. Passing through a window, a concentrated strip of light could catalyze a longing for an indiscriminate distribution of light. In successions of thoughts and remembrance, a yearning for the past origin (God) can turn into the anticipatory desire of a future where the origin will become available again. Sculpture is thus thought through as an amalgam of recollection and longing.
Intermediaries (2)
Biblical excerpts, read by Kenyan-Finnish alto Erica Salmi, reverberate throughout the space. The readings begin with the ‘Our Father’, followed by a passage on divine providence over ‘the lilies of the field’ and ‘the birds of the air’. They end with a narrative in which the prophet Elijah prayed for his death, fell asleep under a broom tree and was awakened by an Angel who touched him saying, “arise and eat”, giving him a cake of bread and a jar of water. The readings are succeeded by a section of the German romantic composer Robert Schumann’s Vogel als Prophet (Bird as Prophet) from his Waldszenen (ForestScenes)—one of nine short pieces for solo piano completed in 1849, whilst he suffered cycles of debilitating depression. In Vogel als Prophet, ascending and descending arpeggios and austere harmonic contradictions form a setting in which a divine message is delivered through a bird. In both the narrative of Elijah and the scene of Schumann’s prophetic bird, there is a meeting of divine providence and despair. Drawing on the ontological position of both the Christian Discourses (1848) and Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits (1847) by Danish theologian and philosopher, SørenKierkegaard, ‘the lilies of the field’ and ‘the birds of the air’ are posited as messengers that call for an attentiveness to their state of being. Throughout these narratives, necessity and the natural world exist in close relation to the human psyche. They function as intermediaries: points of contact with the ‘absolute good’ in which permanence and extreme fragility coalesce.