Beyond Matter
Installations video
Curated by Angel Moya Garcia
Location: Tenuta Dello Scompiglio Iatly
The installation Sanctum, developed especially for Tenuta Dello Scompiglio, testifying of a fictitious religious conviction, engages all the senses of the visitor. The last room where visitors ended their journey in Kerguénnec, nell'installazione "The relativity of the matter", becomes the starting point for a more elaborate proposition in the expositive space of Dello Scompiglio. Levi van Veluw based Sanctum on of the first religious buildings, the Tabernacle, also called the tent of meeting. This tent served as a place of worship and symbolized God’s presence amidst those who had gathered.
Beyond Matter: The floor, walls and ceiling of the installation are made of glass. Behind it, the entire setting is composed of an organic relief that is interspersed with what appear to be sacral patterns and shapes, exhibited as if they were the remains of a mysterious cult. With its industrial steel-and-glass structure, the installation also explicitly refers to modernist architecture. The clean and minimalist formal approach of the cube contrasts starkly with the handcrafted, richly ornamented and seemingly timeworn character of the sacral-looking artifacts displayed behind and underneath the glass.
In contrast with these very divergent visual languages, Van Veluw shows how modern-day Western society views physical remnants of distant times and places. Exhibiting items behind glass creates a physical as well as conceptual distance. Any object taken out of the real world and conserved within a glass display immediately becomes precious, and acquires an air of truth and institutional importance.