Evidential crack — my own photographs
Something comes out of the injuries time has left in a sacred building.
It is not an attack from outside, not an invasion, not a contagion. It is an exodus. The building is not corrupted: it is found to be corrupt. What comes out of a lacuna in the mosaic, a crack in the plaster, a tear in the wood, is what the institution had hidden, fed and kept in the dark within its own interstices, and what is now setting out.
The point they come from is never a functional opening. Almost always it is what time has done to the material. The damage is what reveals that something was inside, and the building has no other way of saying it.
They are spiders and ants. The spider is the inhabitant of interstices: it does not have to be introduced, it was already there, and it is the creature one finds where no one has looked for a long time. The ant is the procession, the collective body moving in one direction only. Neither of them flies. Whatever flies has no need for matter to give way: a window will do. These walk, and to walk they need something to open. They do not spin, they do not devour, they do not settle.
Where the flow arrives is the second half of the image. A Virgin, a pulpit, a confessional, a cross circled and left behind, a sealed reliquary with no way out at all. The building remains imposing, splendid, intact. Only what the exodus walks toward changes. None of the twelve destinations promises the walk leads anywhere.
Every architecture in this series is a photograph taken by the artist, on location, on the dates given. The generative intervention introduces only the creatures and their path; no architectural element has been invented, removed or replaced. The juncture between the documented order and the impossible one is deliberately left legible: the work is not a photograph and does not ask to be taken for one.
