Religation Room (Borderline series)
2006
Antique healing stretcher, patinated bronze, steel, wood and covers of old aluminum medical records with personal documents, photographs, sketches, notes and drawings in mixed technique on Canson paper.
427 x 395 x 275 cm. (variable dimension Installation)
Private Collection
Environmental Artwork. Shown for the first time in “Borderline”, Personal Exhibition, Villa Manuela Gallery (UNEAC), Havana.
Religare: Performatic Vision of Pain
Religation Room is a work conceived from an old stretcher of healings converted into a fakiric bed of thorns covered with sharp rivets of rusty bronze and seven knives piercing through it just in the place where the chakras, as energy centers, would occupy in a human body lying on it. It is inspired by the practices of spiritual discernment, considering them as open doors to the experience of death. Two old metallic medical record folders (in the form of logbooks) exhibit notes, drawings, sketches, photographs and personal documents, to complete this work that discusses the experience of existential pain in a performative dimension.
Religated Reality: The Transcendental Dimension
Establishing a symbiotic interrelationship between concept of religare (religation) and the transcendent dimension of the human being, this work alludes to art and the process of creation (in a healing perspective as “reconquest” or “self-restoration”), as a symbolic exercise of personal and cultural exorcism. Religation Room proposes, in this way, an approach to the concept of religio-religatio from the coordinates of a liturgical and ritual practice of contemporary art as a point of suture, exutorium or detoxification praxis.