The body is a threshold. The Portal is hanged at the entrance to the space. It represents a figure suspended between stone and light, gravity and lightness. The Portal can be touched, it caresses the body of those who pass through it. This initial contact announces the possibility, afterwards, of letting oneself go among the blankets and pillows of the Deposition Ceremony.
The Portal unfurls the silhouette of a human figure on a large curtain that opens a passage of light, a “mise en abyme” of the church door. A detail of the expanded St. Severus chapels marble is superimposed on the figure. The body is held in balance between the elements of the installation, becomes part of the coexistence between the organic and the inorganic, between the permanent and the ephemeral. The wind that moves Portal, the light that passes through it throughout the day, becomes part of the work. The fabric is the manifesto of what gathers, sews, weaves the universe of CARE.
In the chapels, four bodies operate a ceremonia. Between gestures and blankets, they invite the viewer to experience an out-of-time posture, shavasana (“corpse pose”), where the body draws on the memory of what it has forgotten.
They lay their bodies on the ground, members supported by kitchens and blankets, wrapped in fabrics printed with details of the marbles of the church itself. From time to time, they invite visitors to experience this intimate ceremony of non-acting. They arrive toward the viewer with questions written on blank sheets of paper. They don’t speak but their presence is frank and the indication explicit: “Do you want to experience CARE?” (“Do you want to slow down?” “Do you want to cross the threshold of the visible? Follow me…”) The relationship is part of the ceremonies, it is at the heart of “care” and CARE. “The angel” merely comes to the other and arranges the conditions of his inaction; he is a witness and guarantor of the importance of his non-action. This is the care of CARE.
In the action of deposition of the body, no longer a spectator, the stretched and covered viewer experiences the work from within while giving back to the viewer another aspect: the sculptural relationship between his body and that of the performer. Perceiving and being perceived.
A performer lays bare the habitual and sacred act of rest.
In front of the altar he moves, lies, plays and unfolds a kind of bed. He lies down as if in a room without walls. To lay down one’s body in a public place is a suspension, a wandering. A transgressive act. This figure transgresses and becomes our newfound body, its naked truth. Infinite fall, infinite vulnerability, mysterious presence. In the exhibition space this body welcomes us and invites us to follow it. We take off our shoes and slowly empower ourselves, self-determine to participate in this condition. This is what it is about: sharing a socially inhibited condition. Meeting each other, looking at each other for no real reason. Sharing this common denominator that acts in spite of ourselves: the body.
Between the visible and the invisible, a jet of smoke exhales from the church’s ancient underground drains. The cloud dissolves sometimes as a miracle, sometimes as a luminous vignette.
The first wish was for a brazier in which herbs would burn. The smoke would have been a fragrance and a sacred, ceremonial element to cleanse the atmosphere and dialogue with the unseen. Instead, it is declared as a “special effect”: clouds of smoke that cyclically exhale from the church basement toward the nave. They rise from the closed stairs leading to the ancient drip pits. It is an impermanent and random event that holds our attention and presence, moves the imagination toward unpredictable combinations that light and atmosphere compose along with the presences.
The video-installation reflects on the boundary between wakefulness and sleep. Located behind the altar, it confronts us with an assumption: in sleep something happens, life is expressed and processed in spite of ourselves. Sleep reveals the dream, the dream creates life. To approach the boundary between sleep and wakefulness, the image describes a stream of consciousness intertwined with a sound track. The image has the proportions of a bed, our gaze rests. The long time of sleep opens to a perceptual exploration of the subtlest signs of life where non-action reaches contemplation. Who are these sleepers? What are they dreaming about? What movements are they experiencing in their apparent stillness? The image of a night thunderstorm opens the poetic and childlike path of dreaming.
A table, scattered sheets of paper and pencils direct us to draw the body. Dive in, observe it, listen to it and imagine it. How do I see my body at this very moment? The request seems trivial and yet it brings us right back to that very taboo: to represent my body I must immerse myself, take time, listen to how I am or how I imagine it, no longer making any difference between the outside and the inside, the public and the intimate, the skin and the organs. One becomes a creator of a self-image that makes us get in touch with primitive zones of our being: memories of childhood, and more deeply, something archaeological, perhaps prehistoric, that brings us closer to a time without language, to a silent scream.
This drawing is me as a spectator making it, laying myself down and lying on a blank sheet of paper. It is ritual of the self. The collected drawings compose a fresco of our community stripped of social infrastructure.
Constant sound fills us and uninterruptedly fills the space we inhabit. But what is the sound of the invisible and the underworld? In the CARE installation, sound wants to present itself as a silence that arises from the intimate dialogue with one’s body and its sensations. Sound becomes a vehicle of the imperceptible, a witness and a body-recording.
The relationship to sound, as well as in every aspect of the installation, is the brazier in which intuition is consumed. The two sound compositions restore an immersive dimension, a feeling of belonging and collectivity.
The listening device with wireless headphones allows us to circulate in space and remain close to this confession and its secret. Everyone in their own intimacy can savor a unique nuance and return to a distant place they seem to have already crossed: memory.
The testimonies will be integrated with the recordings of the users in order to trace all together an archaeology of sensation.
