How sculpture can support us? / Slideshow

Evening Talk – How sculpture can support us? 03/07

Setting foot in florence for a field trip, which I planned to make a leather apron I got lost in a city people call Florence. Not truly lost, since as an artist I trained myself to do so and educated myself with a odd sense of orientation. One that at least keeps me occupied. And I remembered a phrase my mother uttered when she lost something in the house. Sint Antonius goede vrind maak dat ik mijn schoen weer vindt. Or: St Anthony my old friend, make my find my shoes again. For every single thing she lost, she'd call this divine providence to aid her in her search. I made myself to look for him, since I was suspicious of his strength. Every time I lost myself I would look for the presence of his image which was plentiful in the city and once I found him, I took a picture. Anthony I've been told, is the guardian of lost objects and I don't think lost souls.

Anthony comes in many forms. But in most cases I found him he looked away from us. Not the kind of looking away like the great heroins of the past, nor a gaze of humility or desperation But of a strange and almost amorphous kind. That is how I recognized him. Looking out for someone who, when I found him turned his look down, but his eyes up. A little autistic looking, asking for compassion with his situation but refusing to give a lot of insight in what that situation may be. With this strange unwanted unreachability he became the patron of (I read) many things, the poor, the baker, the traveller, the wedded and the feverish. And another thing I found was that he was always holding something. Unlike like many other sculptures which object they'd be holding signified their function, status or predicament. Anthony was always holding something else, making him much harder to identify. Sometimes it was baby jesus, sometimes a pendant, sometimes a plant and it was as though for everything he's holding, he's holding something back as well. This is how, I believe he quickly became the patron of lost things. [...]