Exvoto> Spoon
Do you recognise this “spoon”? I am sure that if you do and know the project … you will understand why I am making an exvoto and a prayer for the object.
For the ones that do not know the project … I will soon be posting the final object that hopefully will be out on the market. Keep an eye!
Potlatch
“(…) In his writings on gifts, the French anthropogist Marcel Mauss (1972-1950) refers to a particular and very rare type of ritual known as potlatch, widespread among the Indian peoples of north-west America (the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian). Its original purpose was to redress the balance, trhough ritualised forms of destruction, of social differences caused by the accumulation of possessions. The spectacular destruction of surplus goods therefore assumes the role of a socio-political sacrifice in which the loss of property is associated with the possibility of attaining power. ‘And it is only through loss that glory and honour can be associated with goods. Potlatch is the opposite of the principle of conservation.’
Norma Jeane’s potlatch pieces are the contemporary expression of an ancient sacrifice in a society which idolises and pursues the accumulation of possessions as an end in itself.”
By Alessandra Galasso
‘STRANGELY FAMILIAR. In the studio: Norma Jeane’. TATE ETC. Issue 11/Autumn 2007 (page 62)
No commentsExvotos 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.
