PANTHEON PHANTASMA
13.01.–19.01.2020

„Et les rites sont dans le temps ce que la demeure est dans l‘espace.” – Antoine de Saint–Exupery

Thus the writer attributes to the ritual a potential for conveying a feeling of security and defines it further as a symbolic technique of containment. „They transform being in the world into being at home. They make the world a reliable place. They are in time what an apartment is in space. They make time habitable. Yes, they make it walkable like a house. They arrange time, furnish it.“ (*Byun Chul Han, 2019)

In uncertain times, people usually conjure up history, tradition and cultural heritage. Thus a ritual can also be understood as a reflection on a common identity.
The design of the >ritual habitus< is constantly bound to social influences. They transmit and represent those values and orders which carry a community. Rituals often amortize a community without linguistic communication, but through their very own semiotic system. With a view to a society that is growing together more and more, but at the same time individualized, which allows the individual to be isolated from himself and his environment, new forms of community life - new rituals - are needed. As soon as the constitution of space changes, the home must be adequately adapted.

In the ritual framework, things are not consumed or consumed, but needed. Ritual practices ensure that we deal and resonate not only with other people, but also with things. Rituals possess the ability to make accessible the unmistakable aura of earthly material that radiates incessantly from its core. Conversely, the earthly material gives the ritual an anchor to which transcendent experiences can be tied. Thus the ritual connects man and material, space and time.

If we want to understand rituals as „cunstrui humanitas“, spaces must be created in which ritual forms can be spoken about. The exhibition „Pantheon Phantasma“ revolves around the many varieties of our identitary obsession in inhabited space: from rediscovered rites and invented rituals to inflation from the irrational idealization of living and back to the absolute authenticity and originality of the home.