Camera #5 (Chamber #5)

INSTALLATION

CECILIA BERTONI

2019

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sound  Carl G. Beukman
construction and technical direction  Paolo Morelli
with  Alice Mollica, Chiara Nardi
and  Daniele Ghilardi

Cecilia Bertoni - Camera #5

The act of writing my will was the stimulus necessary to explore more substantially my death, the necessity of death. Browsing through history, revisiting aesthetic languages, I glimpsed in the funerary representations, the desire to carry the security of one’s own home into the afterlife.
I, on the other hand, would like to sneak away from the materiality of my home, by which I mean also my body.
I perceive death as an instant between two opposing and interdependent processes.
For this moment of passing, I want to be able to strip off everything that belongs to this world in order to be able to be elsewhere, with lightness, without anchor. I waver between the security and the insecurity of what can remain of me once stripped of corporeality, of time and of earthly space, to enter into an existence that in the present, I can only sense.
I imagine my funeral and my body appears to me, naked, entering and burning in the flames, wrapped in this burial cloth on which I have embroidered the entangled alliance between earthly life and the otherworld.
To draw this passage, I relied poetically on alchemical symbolism. (Cecilia Bertoni)

Bibliography
Marie-Louise von Franz, La morte e i sogni, Bollati Boringhieri, 1986
Willy Minkes, Wrap the Dead: The Funerary Textile Tradition from the Osmore Valley, South Peru and Its Social-political Implications, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, 2005