THE FIFTH DAY
2020 Alberto Favaro
Art installation created
for the APS MdinaCathedral
Contemporary Art Biennalle 2020
Malta
Link: mdinabiennale.com/
Video animation based on
“The fall of man” by
Albrecht Dürer
Taxidermy executed
by Mark Buhagiar.
Description
Sacredness and environment share a similar kind of relationship with the human being.
We, humans, are both natural beings and creators of the sacredness, nevertheless we constantly exclude ourself form these two fields. We are direct offspring of bacteria and monkeys but we define any of our actions and their consequences as artificial anthropizations, pointing out a supposed unnaturalness in our way to exist and modify the world. A relation that sets humans and environment in direct contrast, placing ourself as living being, but out of nature.
Something similar could be said about sacredness.
Humans created religion, as a field also strongly characterize by differentiation. As the etymological root suggest, sacer is whatever belongs to the “other” than human. Sacred, in religious terms, is a space, an object or a person which has ceased to concern the human, becoming divine instead. Therefore sacralization is first of all a differentiation explicated through rituals demarcating spaces and objects elected to become other than human.
Religion belongs to humans and humans belong to nature, nevertheless a conflictual relation that opposes the natural to the artificial and the profane to the sacred has been opted by us, instead than a holistic one.
It' s not surprising that the most sacred place that had been intended for humans was precisely a natural environment: the Garden of Eden, joining these two realities with humans as a balanced unity. No human activity, labour, development and consequent appropriation of the environment was required for a humanity hosted and assisted throughout by their God.
"The fall of Man" represent precisely the moment where the need to differentiate these three element took place. Out of the Garden of Eden plants and animals became just hostile threats or resources to be exploited under human control. The man fallen form Eden needed first of all to distance himself from nature and the sacred. He defined first of all borders between what was human and what was not. To distance himself form nature he dressed up and built a house that would contain him. To distance himself form the sacred he outlined outside his house specific areas and hours of the day that would contain the sacred. In this process of self-exclusion the practice of drawing limits, both physical and conceptual, became essential.
Museums picture perfectly this human process of pigeonholing reality circumscribing fields and categories of belonging from which we impose an epistemological detachment and self-exclusion. Within these spaces Nature and the Sacred, viewed trough glass cabinets or hanged, could be experienced just as objects of knowledge or aesthetic ones, reality obeys just to a simple division and aim: there is who observe and what is observed, no other relations are allowed. Museums are spaces where the dichotomy between human being and whatever surrounds him become an evident true experienceable by everyone.
The installation "THE FIFTH DAY" questions these aspects by focusing on the process of museification. Taxidermy (usually exposed in Natural History Museums) is placed in front of a religious artwork from the Cathedral Museum.
The two fields overlaps in an uncanny juxtaposition, thereby querying the conventional human role, which we take for granted, between examiner and examined object.