In the Hollow of Your Hands

Set on a wall ledge, a glass bowl holds a hybrid blend of waters from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the miraculous spring at Lourdes. Fashioned to the size of the artist’s cupped palms, the transparent bowl recalls the offering rituals of Buddhism and other religions. Its connotation is twofold: marking time in the exhibition process with the mediator’s daily maintenance, and evoking the tragic stories of the symbolically intersecting fates of Walter Benjamin and Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Both crossed the Pyrenees border zone, Benjamin at Lourdes and Portbou, and Sousa Mendes at Hendaye. By chance, on a straight line drawn between the cities of Portbou and Hendaye, Lourdes is directly on the path. The fortuity of this encounter manifests in the bowl as an intimate geography that explores the invisible.