Art at the Abbey

Personal universe is an installation developed by artist  Mateo Maté specifically for the Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos, Spain), a Romanesque abbey still inhabited by a small community of Benedictine monks who, although they do not reject certain conveniences and advantages of the modern world (such as computers and medical progress), still organise their daily life according to the strict timetable established by the founders of the order.

In the installation, organized by Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), different ordinary objects – some shoes, a pair of glasses, a book of prayers, a desk lamp – form a strange floating constellation that has a spherical wrapping. A small camera moves through the room and its mechanical gaze, fragmented and in black and white, is projected in real time on the wall of the room through which visitors gain access to the installation.

Thus, by exploring the dialectic between the spiritual and the material that ecclesiastics use to build their world, Maté creates a space that is, at the same time, spectral and concrete, phantasmagoric and tangible, and that invites us to reflect on the process by which we build our own mental universe.

Mateo Maté (Madrid, 1964) uses ordinary objects from daily life, in many cases even objects linked to his own domestic routine, to explore how in late modernity the spaces we inhabit are racked with tension and violence, where what is private and social, political and existential, individual and collective mix together and become blurred.

Date: until June 27.
Location: Abadía del Monasterio Santo Domingo de Silos. Burgos, Spain.

See some details of the installation in the following slideshow: