Colpo, 2021
The valuing of ‘nobler materials’ such as marble or exotic woods is rooted in colonial ideology and is predominantly unsustainable and unethically sourced. Marxist undertones in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology raise questions of the conditions of liveability for those people in the background of the wood industry. Violating the rights of indigenous people, deforestation is harmful to the planet and is historically engrained with the slave trade.
Reflecting on the carvings from antiquity, eurocentrism has privileged the patriarchal paradigm for white male sculptors. I reconceptualised elements from Bernini’s Ecstacy of St Teresa to open up the phenomenological territory. Thus creating a space where orientations can render even when “queer” may not be part of the immediate scope.
