'The Basin': Art Trail 3 - Ritual Space [Draft 1.0]

All Images: Hotwells/Cumberland Basin, Bristol, April 2024

'Ritual Space’:

This is a collaborative, multidisciplinary endeavour, demonstrating a clear desire to reimagine the traditional parameters the exhibition space. The objective has become to find ways to think in terms of modalities of association and interrelatedness rather than modalities of separation. Intersectionality and emergence soon became key operators, underpinning the intention that the new topology would be a place where not only different artists are programmed but rather it would understand itself as a place where an ecology of energetically and structurally different gatherings can take place. The over-coding of earlier imperatives is clearly evident - whether through applied surface coatings, or by showcasing the debris of contemporary subcultural diversions. In this way, we retain the insights of the postmodern code from a more complex vantage that is able to integrate it, as well as the others, in a multilayered perspective. Fleeting encampment and vehicular abandon are not unknown.

The space itself is experienced as a ‘glade of contemplation’, separated out from the surrounding machinery, and defined by forest trunks and the intervals between. Interiority operates through the canopy above [although certain tantalising sight-lines to The Control Room do remain]. The question is posed: with which parts of our bodies and which senses, with which freedoms and responsibilities, do we want to encounter artworks and each other in these spaces? Certainly, access/egress are permitted from all directions, although a clear processional route is also indicated.

All our actions when constructing a ritual space come from choices which are fundamentally crooked in nature. Instead of seeing God as a distant man in the sky, we will begin to see the Godly nature of reality itself, that every moment is an unfathomable gift that just keeps on giving. Consequently, variable viewpoints are intrinsic, with insights sectioned accordingly, as devotees interact with the assorted sacred features assembled within [fertility/offering mounds, divine texts, cosmological diagrams, symbolic pictograms, and mysterious artefacts such as ‘The Step-Up’, etc.]. If we presume the conditions of a ritual space per se are to evoke the primacy of something which we are not completely aware of, then ‘Ritual Space’ becomes something of a platform upon which to lay our fascinations.

Written without A.I. [for better or worse].