The experiment for PSL 2022, the collective design of a shrine. was presented publicly on Friday July 8, 2022 in Makrinitsa in an event entitled "Future Relics on a Damaged Planet: A Shrine."
PROMPT:
We were drawn to the etymology of the word shrine, which comes from the Latin scrinium ‘chest for books or papers’. While later morphing into a chest for bones and relics of saints, this original meaning is evocative of the hybrid and multimodal assemblage that the cohort will thoughtfully gather and preserve in this vessel. We envisioned the shrine as a site of collective mourning for the heavy losses and unmarked deaths of the past years, the virulent damage to other species and to our planet, while also a refuge in which to reactivate and nurture bonds with spectral presences while imagining after/worlds. Shrines of course are sites of pilgrimage - in this case not for the one, but for the many, for the community to come. Shrines accrete. When people come to them, as we hope will happen during the lab and after, depending on how the shrine develops physically and online, they leave something of themselves. The shrine is inherently viral. It can even be mobile: a tabernacle. Both a broadcasting tower and a portal: transmitting and gathering. The shrine is ancient, but of our age.
If anything can, we believe that the Shrine can manifest and articulate After/Lives. Manifest what is no longer and what is not yet. Articulate what is unnamed while also making and holding space and time for the unnameable, particularly in its more-than-human forms.
We were drawn to the etymology of the word shrine, which comes from the Latin scrinium ‘chest for books or papers’. While later morphing into a chest for bones and relics of saints, this original meaning is evocative of the hybrid and multimodal assemblage that the cohort will thoughtfully gather and preserve in this vessel. We envisioned the shrine as a site of collective mourning for the heavy losses and unmarked deaths of the past years, the virulent damage to other species and to our planet, while also a refuge in which to reactivate and nurture bonds with spectral presences while imagining after/worlds. Shrines of course are sites of pilgrimage - in this case not for the one, but for the many, for the community to come. Shrines accrete. When people come to them, as we hope will happen during the lab and after, depending on how the shrine develops physically and online, they leave something of themselves. The shrine is inherently viral. It can even be mobile: a tabernacle. Both a broadcasting tower and a portal: transmitting and gathering. The shrine is ancient, but of our age.
If anything can, we believe that the Shrine can manifest and articulate After/Lives. Manifest what is no longer and what is not yet. Articulate what is unnamed while also making and holding space and time for the unnameable, particularly in its more-than-human forms.