126 In Berlinde De Bruyckere's artistic history, respect for public space starting with knowledge of its history is a constant. Invited in 2013 as Belgium's representative artist at the 55th Venice Biennale, in a space full of light, De Bruyckere totally obscured it to accommodate Kreupelhout - Cripplewood, co-curated with Nobel Prize winner for literature J.M. Coetzee, the trunk of a 27-metre elm salvaged from a storm and redeemed with wax shaded in flesh tones and textiles dyed Venetian red. It has been her homage to St. Sebastian, protector of Venice and religious icon (and contemporary queer icon, if only thinking of a masterpiece like Derek Jarman's Sebastiane) most present among the city's masterpieces, where the darkness of the mise-en-scène encapsulated the everlooming warning to Venice to take care so that the darkness of submergence might always be averted. Still in Istanbul, asking for reopening the 19th-century hammam of Çukurcuma, De Bruyckere installed Actaeon II (2012), a reinterpretation of the Greek myth of Actaeon's metamorphosis by Artemis, caught naked bathing; enraged, the goddess turned him into a stag, unrecognised and mauled by his own dogs. Their sorrow was then soothed by the viewing of their master's portrait – thus, by art, and in the (anti)rhetorical figure of metonymy created by the artist, Actaeon is a mass of wax horns resting on pillows. The Çukurcuma Hammam, a place of purification of the body and, in its more recent past, a well-known destination for gay cruising, thus accommodated a tale of desire and catharsis, purification and regeneration through art, like the purification of bodies that take place in hammams. And it is she herself who tells me about respect for sorrow, recalling her solo exhibition Aletheia, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin in 2019-2020, which grew out of her first visit to the slaughterhouse in Anderlecht. «The installation offered an immersive experience to the viewer, who was confronted with a reconstruction of a skin workshop in which wax casts of brine-soaked amorphous heaps of animal skins were stacked on large wooden pallets; a salt-covered landscape of anonymous death. The piled-up skins had a strong impact, but the salt was also a key element, salt in the wound, whose smell and dehydrating effect also make it painful to breathe. Shortly after the opening of the exhibition, the pandemic struck and hit this particular area, and the very act of breathing, very hard. We all recall the column of military trucks carrying out the dead from Bergamo. After the first lockdown, the museum decided to reopen and prolong the exhibition. It was a moment when I felt we had to tread carefully. The pandemic had created a context I was not prepared for, one that would have generated an entirely different experience for the visitors who, at that moment of travel limitations, were mainly local people. We decided to instruct the invigilators to offer some context to the visitors before they entered the space. It is not something I am generally fond of, but in that case it was a needed, and appreciated by many, act of respect. I think it allowed to not only be the brutal confrontation, but also the cathartic experience I intended it to be». The management of brutal confrontation, and therefore of contrast, is crucial in an oeuvre such as De Bruyckere's, which thrives on conceptual contrasts, resolved by the artist through the fecund welcoming of opposites, as she herself explains to me: «The materials I use, the topics I address, incorporate both the frailty and the brutality of things, the horror and the beauty. Never one without the other. Perhaps this layered approach, both material and conceptual, can raise questions, rather than inspire hostility». Material layering involves fifteen to twenty layers of wax, hybridised again with skins, barks, torn textiles, sometimes lead – a perfect matter for her anti-rhetorical shortcircuits, among the heaviest but, once warm, perfectly malleable. Unlike what happens with a block of marble, De Bruyckere adds rather than taking away and, in so doing, she
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