SWORD OF LIGHT

SLICES THE MEAT

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GIOVANNI BLANDINO

Turin | 1998

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Church of Maria Santissima

of the Chain

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The cultural impact of the Church for many centuries has known no equal. 

In fact, it is thanks to a centuries-old process of segregation that the sacred has been able to maintain its primacy undisturbed, increasingly intensifying the separation between the church and the square, the public and the private, elsewhere and the here and now. Allowing the entry of otherness in its most carnal and corporeal sense is the most positive outcome of the process of secularization.  

The installation is structured as a counter-altar of the coffered vault of the Oratory of Maria Santissima della Catena: the configuration of the structure was summarized and installed on the floor with the intention of creating a parallelism with the ceiling of the church.

With this work we intend to restore the proximity between the domain of the sacred, represented by the place of worship, and that of the profane, which finds its symbolic representation in the square.  

The putrescence of the organic matter will be mystified by the constant smoke screen emanating from the incense, strong enough to mask the smell of the rotten but too subtle to hide the death that lies behind so much splendor.