Palo Santo

Through her work Palo Santo, Aurélie Menaldo addresses the notion of a rite of passage by physically engaging the visitor’s body. She invites them to symbolically cross a place of transition: the threshold of the Angle. She thus recreates an essential phase of the ritual, defined by Van Gennep as an in-between marking transformation. The trunks, of varying heights, stand like figures with symbolic, strange, and poetic power. Burned, they highlight the ambivalent role of fire, both destructive and purifying.

An immersive, mystical, and contemplative experience, accentuating the transitional effect specific to rites of passage, this installation is like a micro-fiction, much of which remains to be written by the imagination of the people who pass through it.

21 burnt tree trunks, burnt branches, tung oil. 10×3,5×3 m