Eleftherios Ambatzis: February 2008 Archives
Alchemists attempted to regenerate their souls and transform them into a divine condition by following different paths throughout history. Their goal and method was united in one ‘process’ that is ultimately never ending. In this everlasting journey through philosophical and spiritual exploration, their aim was to reach a point of personal understanding about the fundamental nature of the universe and its workings. In order for this exploration to take place, they created a field of exclusion sharing a language of complex codes and symbols in order to communicate secretly with one another, a fact which made sense in an era when the price for evoking in the alchemical heresy was death.
Christianity always had a predefined path for someone to follow, without allowing space for discovery, exploration and the creation of something ‘new’. It is restricted on linking the present to the past through a range of navigational stories and traditional liturgies, without moulding the ground of an unpredictable and emerging trajectory into the future.
My aim is to displace the ecclesiastical reality into a new field condition where imagination is the guiding principle structuring everyday life. By using all possible methods for guidance through this culture of fantasy, the church becomes a site of sensual inhabitation where one immerses himself to find his way though. A system of stations and paths, points and lines, beings and relations, forms an urban retreat living on its own rules and rhythms, reconciling the real and the fantastical, the mental and the manual. This ecclesiastical heterotopia of esoteric dynamics, of continuity and connectivity within the different places it envelops, becomes a matrix unifying diverse elements into a total whole.
Based on the formation of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life –a diagram used by alchemists to picture the nature of reality as the intersection of 22 paths or ‘states of becoming’ and ten localities- the church becomes a network of discoveries; a pataphysic universe of transformations.
“The Church of the infinite paths” takes Christianity as a starting point to an erratic journey into the future.
