In the framework of the biennial program dedicated to the theme of the removed in contemporary society, the project imagined by Namsal Siedlecki starts from the rituality of India’s most representative Hindu festival, Dur-gā Pūjā. The festival lasts six days: every year, thousands of devotional idols are built and finally immersed in the rivers. The process leading to the creation of a fetish depicting the goddess Durgā, with her characteristic ten arms, always starts with a stuffed soul, which Namsal uses to make the base of a new sculpture, a new idol. In the centre of the nave, this figure stands on a terracotta pedestal. The barely sketched existence of the soul in straw, still without feet, hands and head, is fixed in the permanence of the bronze, a solid, shiny body with the appearance of armour on the one hand Siedlecki subtracts a moment of festive rituality, taking away the fetish, on the other hand he reintroduces new forms of processuality through his own vocabulary. Once a day, the sculpture is reactivated by animating itself through the transformative capacity of matter: recreating the physical mechanism of sublimation, a silhouette of ice sublimates from a solid to a gaseous state, creating a dense condensation around the work.
Placed in a hollow at the top, around where the head of the goddess should emerge, this seems to evoke a transfiguration of the sacred into the profane, without renouncing the idea of transcendence of the original rituality. Once a day, the transfiguration shows the symbolic and evocative nature that goes beyond the object itself, leading to changes in the bronze itself over the course of the exhibition through oxidative effects.
The exhibition consists of two further series of works, distributed on the lower and upper floors, which take up the idea of the processuality of the natural world. The Deposition series, in the former fountain, is a two-dimensional canvas that has taken on a three-dimensional sculptural dimension due to the effect of a particular volcanic water. Placed under a waterfall in Saint-Nectaire, a small village in central France, the canvases were petrified for six months. Flowing over the jute, the water deposits calcite crystals, but whereas in the case of stalactites, these take hundreds of years, here nature accelerates this process, showing the result of a metaphorical journey through time.
The work Limes, suspended instead under the dome of the presbytery, is inspired by the concept of limit and frontier. When the body of a wolf is found, according to Italian law, it must be cremated in specialised centres. In Limes, the ashes of a wolf were scattered inside molten crystal, later cast into moulds in the shape of the work. The ancient Romans, who feared and admired the wolf that looked after them, were the first to make glass windows to protect their dwellings and called limes the boundary, of the house as well as of the empire. A glass window that usually separates the animal and human worlds, in this case, brings them together, acting as a transpa-rent barrier between two universes. Where the altar refers to the point where the divine meets the human, the work constitutes a meeting point.
All the works in the exhibition move on the border between what is properly human and what tends to go beyond it: the sacred, nature, the animal, showing how these dimensions, which western society tends to separate, ine-vitably interpenetrate. The transformative capacity of matter, the physical and chemical processes of nature and technology are the elements that Namsal Siedlecki uses in his research to change the plane of reading and interpretation of reality.
