What is our relationship with conflict? The conflict with ourselves, with the others? Does the fight reveals us, or does it enable us to hide ourselves? It may represent a fragile shell. It may allow us to have a look at ourselves under a new point of view, through something different.
Glass is firstly a fluid, organic, liquid matter. Then is get hard as it cools down, and it has this 'double materiality', this transformation capacity, first liquid then solid. When molten, the glass is highly resistant due to the molecules inside that keep on moving, and escapes the possibility to be given a shape. Once frozen, its fragility, its hardness and coldnessare also part of what constitute it, its very life. As we are socially used to be taught that conflict is a wrong thing and must be avoided at all costs, and furthermore that it is a natural to avoid conflict, art has been studying this theme, as something that constitute the human condition. For example, Delacroix's canva depicting Jacob's figtj with the Angel. It doesn't seem to judge the conflict and doesn't depict it as a wrong event. It may look more like an inside quest of someone looking for himself. Besides in the story of Jacob, winning the fight with the Angel (and not against the Angel) allows him to find a new identity and and new meaning to his life. |
Photo Nicolette Humbert
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