Søren Engsted

In December 2009 I travelled to Monte Verità (Mountain of Truth) to bury a white canvas. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a mountain in Ascona, Switzerland, was re-baptised Monte Verità (Mountain of Truth) turning into the headquarters of a community in search of an anti-capitalist reformist lifestyle, healthier and closer to nature. Some of its members believed the site held healing powers. International artists, writers and intellectuals frequented the place. Among these, German-born Swiss author Herman Hesse was a resident of the community for a brief time when he dug himself in the ground as a therapy against alcoholism. This image represents the first of a series of five actions that I am developing, where I bury canvas in the ground of geographic locations of spiritual significance spread around the world. The choice of a canvas relates to the fact that this is unequivocally the most cliché artist material, and at the same time resembles the loose white linen dresses that the first inhabitants were wearing. Bizarrely, such typical artists material becomes the most suitable matter to absorb “spiritual energies”, and to question their existence concentrated in a specific location on Earth, a situation that obviously arises from the traditional clash between rationalism (and its belief in science) and religion. The canvasses will lay there until i get invited to show them for an audience.