The most holy of waste materials - The aesthetic and performative aspects of the sacred (R-9063)

By what means can the sacred be engaged with, and what sort of waste materials and traces does this engagement leave behind? What are the aesthetic qualities of the sacred? By sacred I mean the moments of ecstasy when the self becomes part of the image it contemplates and borders and categories are broken down. It is in these moments that consciousness and rational thought are overridden and the knowledge of the body and the unconscious takes over. The ecstatic moment that the sacred brings cannot be contained by structured language and rational discourses, it can only be fixated into material means through a type of simulation or parody that threats its subject as irreducible, an excess of meaning barely contained. The sacred encounter and dialogue is thus staged, performed and played with. My principal tool for this staging is the role I have cast for myself, the shaman. The character is in permanent construction and feeds from all kind of sources, be they artistic, academic or autobiographical. The spiritual traces are both found at and created by the encounter with other subjectivities/objects and their otherness spreads and ripples across our senses and into our unconscious, invisibly reshaping our lives.

Keywords:Narratology

Disciplines:Curatorial and related studies, History, Art studies and sciences, Artistic design, Audiovisual art and digital media, Heritage, Music, Theatre and performance, Visual arts