White ship

2024

Cane, twine and plaster.
Carles Fontserè Studio Garden, Porqueres, Catalonia.
With the Porqueres City Council (participatory creation)

Of interest is the study of the symbolic ship (or ark) as a space where the most intimate life can be preserved. A history that dates back to the megalithic naves of the Bronze Age; and that we can recognize through stories and objects from different ancient traditions. In Noah’s Ark of the Old Testament, which like a womb preserves life on the planet, or in the Greek epic of the Odyssey, where the ship is presented to us as another metaphor for the human desire to survive.

The piece is motivated by a popular agricultural technique from the Nordic countries traditionally made with rye straw called Himmeli, and which uses the geometry of the octahedron, a regular convex polyhedron, one of the Platonic solids.