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Illuminated
Sanctuary of Empty Sins
Mounted in the typical Tuscan landscape with its self-possessed
beauty, the incongruent presence of sophisticated incinerator –
collecting all the differentiated and non differentiated refusals
of the area of Val d’Elsa – is certainly imposing. It is
in this place that Neri Ward has decided to locate his work: Illuminated
Sanctuary of Empty Sins. The work, in the shape of a great sculpture
open to public access, has for its basis a rampart located next to
the incinerator, a previous refuse heap now covered up. It covers
what is residual of our consumption, needs and desires, no matter
of well or badly satisfied this might be, and which we now do not
want to see. As if we had decided to remove them from our sight, even
when fully aware of their existence. This theme is very important
to Nari Ward: what our contemporary culture chooses to preserve and
to eliminate from our shared historical memory; what we decide to
sacrifice, not by a sacred ritual, but through a process of reduction
of the value and dignity of what has been and which is now reduced
to the toxic remains of our production and consumption. The work consists
of a caravan with walls covered in white translucent alabaster, its
wrecked bonnet buried under a mass of iron residuals produced by the
incinerator. Inside the caravan the sanctuary unfolds itself. On its
walls hang Teflon bags, the resistant material adopted to collect
the toxic residuals coming from the incinerator; as a sort of votive
offerings placed in a chapel.
In the centre are seats made of cars’ tyres. In the background,
on the semicircular altar made of forged iron - like the alabaster
walls another homage to the local handcraft – numerous red candles
are lit up. A sanctuary then, strictly oriented towards east-west;
a sort of place where to rest to contemplate and reflect, scenery
of a ritual with no officiants, which is also the symbolic and dislocated
sacred womb of the machine destructive of refusals, ethical temple
dedicated to mortality and its processes. |
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