UMBERTO BUTTIGIEG
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Lavation Ceremonials
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Since mid- 2012 I have been investigating  the human body as a material  producing religion, as mouldable clay that shapes itself to perform  ad nausea particular ritualistic acts (please refer to the portfolio  of selected works). Initially, the  practical approach  adopted in developing these ideas was to  extract gestures, movements, sounds and chants related to religious ceremonies and use these elements as a means to explore the state of mind. Later works in the series of works  entitled “The Body Performing Rituals”, have moved away from the appropiation of existing and culturally difused religious gestures and behaviours to documented performaces of new/ invented rituals and actions. In these works, the performers body plays a  balancing  act  between the willingness for enlightenment and  purification and the earthly , instinctive  push  towards  sexual pleasure.  An obsessive, never ending cycle of spiritul death and resurrection, a continuous alternation of whiteness and blackness, of cleaning and dirtying, is a common factor in these later works.

Lately, I have been focusing  my efforts in  attempting to secularize my approach and  creating works that explore the same basic consept of purification, or rather  the attempt at it,  in everyday, mondane rituals. As a visual response to this, the series of works I am currently developing deal with daily lavation ceremonials in domestic environments.

 

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