My research deals with the grey area of ‘faith’, when rationality give way to illogicality. Examining religious rituals and linking them with daily life habits, I discovered men’s need of these traditions. My investigation is not a critique to ‘religion(s)’, neither an anthropological inventory of different religious habits’, rather an investigation about human strategies to accept life’s temporality.
In the Mediterranean countries people have the tradition to offer objects (ex voto) to god in exchange for a benefit or show their gratitude for the granted prayer. In the case of an illness, the believer can also offer a wax reproduction of the sick body part. How far will men believe in the irrational possibility that the reproduction of a sick body part given to god will influence the real recovery of it?
My work is also an attempt to explore the language of the space used by religion to let people belief in its dogmas. The condition required to transform metaphorically the real space into a spiritual space is to place the ‘spiritual’ in the images or the objects needed for the rituals. Imposing distance from the holy objects, the church keeps safe the authenticity of it as a substitute of the spiritual. The church has always used the architectonic language to protect its dogmas through the elements of spatial separation, with fences or gates, and spatial hierarchy, with higher and lower areas. These physical conditions may affect the mental disposition of the believer. Are those strategies the same used in the music or the art world, for instance, or in the media-communication world? How can I recreate those conditions in my work?