Glyptotek I and II, 2014
Digital print and lithography, powder on paper
In carefully observing the figure, deprived of movement and mutilated, I often forget it´s an object (a photograph of an object). I keep looking at its false skin and its scars, which immediately makes me think about Roland Barthes’ words about the process of becoming an object himself and how in such a paradoxical way the photograph here appears to do the opposite, adding life to the petrified figure.
There is something simultaneously disturbing and fascinating about broken statues. I suppose here this tension is primarily linked to the fact that they symbolise the fall of an ancient civilisation, imposing, for this reason, an overwhelming presence of death. We are, indeed, in the presence of a ruin – a sculpture, which is to say an object/thing – that differs dramatically from observing a real body. And it is because they are broken (things) that the figures tell a history of a more complex metamorphosis: a story of a stone transformed into a woman, a goddess, that has travelled over time and that is now displaying her own weaknesses.
Time has done irreparable damage and the goddess has returned to her initial state of stone. Yet the spell was not broken, but, rather, was working intermittently: I see a woman coming through a stone, a rock overlaying a goddess and so on. Her weakness became her strength.
The photographs of Glyptotek were taken at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen, Denmark