132 And it is clear that they are somewhat scandalous images but, as Pasolini wrote, there is no sanctity without scandal. «Reading the Bible is like watching Pasolini», Berlinde De Bruyckere once declared. Berlinde, whose name is borrowed from the saint Berlinde of Meerbeke. Berlinde, whose studio is a building that once housed a Catholic male boarding school. Berlinde, herself grown up in a Catholic boarding school. Berlinde, who sculpts new martyrs in wax like votive candles, resemanticised Christian tópoi such as Saint Sebastian in a trunk, Ecce Homo in a horse, Pietas in the embrace of two mutilated bodies. Berlinde, who through her anti-art, testifies the respect for the sacred and the right to freedom of belief. Given the centrality of religious iconography in her life and work, I ask her what religion is – whether a notebook of poems, a breviary of good conduct, an epistolary entertained with a love lost because discovered to be a liar, an art history manual: «All of the above, and none of them fully. I was never religious, but the religious iconography I was surrounded by growing up in a Catholic boarding school triggered something deep inside me. Those images, as well as the stories from the Old and the New Testament, are part of my lexicon. Though likely intended as a breviary of good conduct, as you suggested, I think what really intrigued me was the brutality of it all. Suffering, death, carnal desire, conflict, the need for transcendence; the turbulent core of the human condition, it was all there. In a way, this helped me not to shy away from the unpleasant in my own practice and to address human nature in its full complexity. This childhood experience was as important as discovering Ovid's Metamorphoses at a later age, or the cinema of Pasolini, or the work of J.M. Coetzee. I refer to it as a cumulative image/literary essay, an archive of impressions, and a universal experience that transcends the boundaries of time and space. That is why, in this sense, Pasolini is an interesting reference: because, like him, I try to envision what happens when the sacred enters the profane». A Pasolinian sense of everything is holy, a spiritual journey focusing on the dimension of a transition for which there won’t be death, but continuous rebirth. I cannot help but think of God Save the �ueer. Feminist catechism (transl., 2022) by Michela Murgia, one of the most luminous intellectuals we had in Italy, who as a profound and conscious believer – therefore, inclined to cultivate doubt – speaks of the practice of the threshold as a Christological practice, drawn from the Gospel of John (John 10, 1-10) at the moment when Jesus says of himself I am the door of the sheep, becoming for this very reason a queer icon: «It is as a woman, as a feminist and as a Christian at the same time that I can seek out, practise and protect the thresholds, the boundary places between the social cages in which it would be demanded that we all should stay. To accept queerness as Christian praxis is to recognise that the border does not surround us, but instead it passes through us, and that what we perceive as contradiction is actually a fruitful space». The angels themselves, and thus her Arcangeli, go beyond gender binarism in the Christian narrative, but they are not the only ones: Palindroom, 2019 is the reproduction of a mare model used for breeding stallions that, while retaining a feminine nature, has a phallic aspect, just as the palindrome characterises a homophonic text, either reading it one way or the other way round. Penthesilea, 2015 evokes the queen of the Amazons killed by Achilles, and it mixes the phallic form of the structure with the vulvar form of the drapery of skins superimposed on it, similar to the forms of the Madonna del Parto (1460) by Piero della Francesca. The series Met tere huid (2014) is a powerful rendering of vulvar forms modelled on a stock of stallion halters.
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