Stone is the Bone of my Mother
HD video, silent with partial sound,
17:27 min.
2019
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Stone is the Bone of my Mother begins with images from the restoration of Michelangelo's sculpture piece the Pietà. This sculpture placed in St Peters Cathedral in Rome, picturing mother Mary and her dead son Jesus in her lap, and a restoration made after an iconoclastic attack on the sculpture.
In 1972, in a sudden act, while the church held its major Sunday mass during Pentecost, the 33-year old Hungarian László Tóth battered the piece with his geologist's hammer, managing to chirp off a part of the nose, one arm and fragments of an eye before he was pulled away from the statue.
After the attack, it was reported that he did see himself both as Christ and Michelangelo, wanting to attack the Virgin’s image with the logical reasoning that because of him being an eternal being, he could have no mother. His use of a geologist's hammer provided by his previous occupation speaks about the cognitive dissonance at the core if this act. As a geologist is much aware of time, how time takes form and demands space—layer upon layer, year after year, from sediment to solid, for us it takes a small eternity for marble to transform under pressure. This must be all to clear for the geologist who is a witness of time under the weight of the mountain.
Recurring through the video is a tension between surfaces, how they constantly oscillate between being in a form and formless state and within or outside of time. An elevated statue never heals itself without the human hand—it needs the caress of a careful preparation, the sanding, the carving and the precise mounting of piece by piece of shattered marble—with its marble veins carefully glued together. Now unable to whither with the elements, eliminating the marks of time—the sculpture is cast out from the realm of time.
© Joel Danielsson & Louise Öhman