All Our Everydays
Curator : Pier Luigi Tazzi
May 22 – July 6, 2008
The project ALL OUR EVERYDAYS aims to make the space of the gallery a place of experiences better than a mere display of artworks.
The main point of reference for the concept of this show has been a sum of impressions based on some specific characters of the Buddhist temple in Thailand. Not taking in consideration its architectural structure that nevertheless is of primary and distinctive importance, here we have been considering its internal functional aspects. The most spatially extended consists of the dense presence, on one hand, of decorations, in form of paintings, sculptures, symbols in any kind of matter, and, on the other hand, of objects from everyday life use, from food through figurines. This part seems to correspond to a sort of “lower world” according to the tripartition described in one of the main texts in the Thai cosmological tradition, Trai phum phra ruang (The Three Worlds of Lord), originally composed in the reign of King Lithai of Sukhotai (1347-68) and revised several times as late as 1820s: a “world inhabited by humans as well spirits, demons and deities”. The other and far the most important one, the reason itself of the very existence of the temple, consists in the statue of Buddha. That is not like in the European religious buildings a figural representation of God but an iconic indication of a way towards the perfection of being. This part seems to correspond to the second world described in the text we referred to above, a world “centred on Mount Meru” as the symbolic aim of any spiritual aspirations. In the quoted text the third world is “the formless world or realm of perfection”.
