Divine Matter

‘Divine matter’ is an action and interventional gallery work commissioned and exhibited by major public arts institution Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, Spain. The work was defined by the performed reconstruction of a late-renaissance European colonial-period religious painting, and of the interconnections activated and embodied in its physical composition – attempting as faithful a reproduction of the original painting as possible, in appearance and physical construction, and publicly recreated within the gallery across the run of the exhibition.

The project draws on, and further develops, the authors’ research and expertise in located, multi-site and intermedial public art practices; as well their recent and ongoing research into the performance of place, performance as place, and the consideration and activation of extended and multiple scales place through performance. Within this context, the work considering the painting as a material product both of the physical landscapes it was made from and the processes of extraction and commodification it was made within.

Research questions include:
How might established processes of artistic intervention and located performance begin to both address and perform their locale at multiple and expanded scales, to consider and reveal the wider landscapes and ecologies they act within?
How might a single artistic act or image be activated to reveal or operate within multiple scales of its location simultaneously?
In what ways might the reconstruction of an historic human-made object, if considered as a composite and construct of all its separate material components, begin to reveal the scale of spatial, temporal and social connections and relationships that were needed to bring it together?
In what ways might such an act of reconstruction, done and presented publicly, expand our understanding of how much our daily actions and interactions increasingly blur the differences between what is local and what is global, and the extent to which things that happen in one place are also part of what is happening, and have happened, everywhere else?
How might an artistic event allow and enable direct and shared public encounters with such an expanded and expanding sense of place?