What is the relationship between the material and the ephemeral?

‘Ritiro’ is an Italian term meaning both ‘pick-up’, as in the action following the package delivery, and ‘retreat’, as in the practice of spiritual introspection.

Ritiro is a work developed from an object-oriented approach with the aim to explore the role of the material as a mediation tool for potential spiritual experiences.

The piece moves in the realm of the contemporary esoteric consumerism phenomenon, where the concrete offerings by the consumer market, specifically of objects labeled as ‘spiritual’, oppose themselves to the very ephemeral nature of alternative beliefs, yet facilitating the practices linked to them.

The standard size packaging items, used to protect and deliver commodities, and therefore containing ever changing, and perpetually mutable desires, undergo a process of transformation, and reiteration. In this procedure, votive candles, purchased online from a dedicated shop, and representing spiritual enlightenment, truth, wisdom, cleansing, and purification, constitute a new materia prima. Through this matter, the ordinary containers partially lose their identity, becoming imbued with a value that, by now, goes beyond economic logics.

As a result, the original devotional burning objects, take shapes that are proper to the shipping universe, thus making the very system of logistics the unreal intermediate through which the inner search for wholeness is pursued.