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The SHAMANIC OBSERVATORY consists in the transformation of an 18th century observatory located in a formal garden of a palazzo in Gallarate (near Milan). The Association which owns it has asked various artists of "visual writing" to set up works around the building and in the garden. My own choice was to transform the old observatory fallen into ruins into a "magical" observatory.
Essentially it consists of five marble "stelae" set in the four niches north, south, west and east of the observatory and one in the center. The sense of the stelae was that they were broken and rejected slabs of marble extracted from a quarry near Brescia, rough-surfaced and minimally worked, and hence metonymic signs for the quarry, pars pro toto. Indeed, except for the central piece, into the rugged and uneven surface of which I cut more than a dozen little niches in intersecting circles and several flights of miniature stairways rightside up and upside down, the four stelae set at the cardinal points of the Observatory show only the rough face of the marble where it was split off from the mass and the minimal signs of tooling used to cut them. This is because the "shaman" lives in an interstitial "space" between nature and society and might conceivably emerge from this hardest core of nature.
The central largest piece (two meters high) is cut into little intersecting circles of niches on the model of Tibetan Kalachakra mandala stelae – and the stairs lead up or down to different mandalic "levels". In each niche sits a light bulb and inside each lightbulb is a tiny lasercut bluish (symbolically spiritual) Australian Aboriginal Buddha–like figure known as the "dreamwalker". Upon each figure is inscribed by laser a word and the "intersecting" words combine into a contemplative text. Up and down the Escher-like stairways climb dozens of reddish (symbolically fleshly) male and female figures from the Aboriginal "crack creatures", each inscribed with a word signifying human suffering or pleasure. This interaction of spirit-like Buddha-figures in light bulbs and humanoid figures outside them is constant throughout the Observatory. The light bulb is an obvious reference to the pop icon of "Idea" or "Thought", but the electrical filaments have been replaced by the tiny figures which glow in the dark, illustrating non-rational, "magical" dreamthought. There are some 250 figures throughout the Observatory, all worded, creating an environmental, poetic-incantatory text, and they all glow, because they are cut out of fluorescent plexiglass which irradiate light produced by hidden sources of "black" light.
On the surrounding four stelae in the four cardinal corners of the niches of the Observatory, there has been no carving in the rough surface of the marble except for the gouges and marks left by the tools which cut away the marble slabs from the quarry walls. It is these minimal signs of the human hand which the tiny "crack creatures" use to ascend their respective stelae toward their goal: at the summit of each stela, "dream-walkers" enter their floating bulbs in order to ascend to the dome of the Observatory, the celestial vault where a hundred light bulbs float with their glowing, Buddha-like "dream-walker" figures waving or peering downwards. These latter glow like stars and form Maya "constellations" in each cardinal direction of the (southern hemispheric) sky strictly in accordance with the recent discoveries of Maya cosmography.
Finally, it will have been noted that there is a deliberate syncretism of shamanic cultures which, irrevocably local and particular in their pre-histories, today have become a reinvigorated with an overall spirit in an era of consumerism and mass-production. A rare but occasional, luridly green (for spirit-world) figure – the Maya SkullKing – is spied here and there to remind us thereof.
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