Archive for September, 2007
Exvotos Collection
In times gone by when you had a secret that you did not wanted anyone to know, you would go up to a mountain, find a tree, make a hole in it and whisper the secret into it. Afterwards you would cover it with mud so that nobody would ever know that secret. Treating the hole in that tree as a place, a space lost.
We do not have these trees any more. Instead our everyday objects act as confessors. Holding the secrets they close their mouths and remain silent. Turning the secret into a prayer, acting as a secular exvoto. Exvotos are artefacts in a Christian tradition. An exvoto is representation in wax of a body part. This wax facsimile is offered in hope and as a prayer in order to cure the afflicted part of the body, or on occasions as gratitude for the cure. I have borrowed the notion so that we may cure not only ourselves but our ill objects. We give increasing importance to the objects we own. The object exvoto imbue objects with an animus which gives human qualities to them.
