Hieros Gamos – The Sacred Marriage

As part of the event “Non solo sposa” (Not only a bride), the Artist Teri Volini presents the work Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage.

Installation – approx. 240 x 120 cm – made with a large photograph (120 x 100 cm) on a banner; a round white tulle veil, 60 cm in diameter, with scalloped embroidery and organza appliqués; a blue tulle veil, 6 m; a violet tulle veil, 2 m, with fabric flowers; two shorter veils in red and orange tulle.

The background image – in the photograph taken by the Austrian artist Helène Gritsch – refers to a performance-symbolic action in Body Art in which the artist uses her own body as an expressive tool.

In Body Art the artist’s body becomes a creative event in itself; it is the work of art itself.

The image is framed by tulle veils, each of which represents – through its colour – a stage of evolution; the violet one with flowers, for instance, carries the wish that true union may blossom; the intense blue one makes us fly into hyperuranian space, the red one brings courage, and so on. The white one – a veil not for a bride but for a first com/munion – marks only a starting point…

The work presents an expansive diversification of the concept of marriage and of the feminine, with a view to overcoming the role to which women were confined for centuries – that of bride as a one-way destiny, without which a woman was considered socially non-existent: a role that diminished her personality.

Starting from a characteristic of woman – being a precious companion to man as well as giving and protecting life – that role transformed and deformed it, emphasising it instrumentally, making it falsely glittering on the one hand and truly constraining on the other, betraying its original importance and beauty, based on the freedom to choose one’s own path.

A work in synergy with the poem of the same title published in the book UNIVERSI.

Some of Teri’s poems act as a counterpoint to her paintings or performances. Heightening feeling and vision nonetheless leaves the different modes of expression independent of one another: the poems are not meant to describe the other works, nor are the latter meant to illustrate the former. What matters is the balance, the happy union that is created, the synergy that arises, in that attempt to achieve the harmony and beauty at the heart of all Teri’s research.

In Hieros Gamos woman can identify – thanks to a higher self-awareness and through the Artist who makes its essence present – with a figure as unusual for our mental and cultural patterns as it was normal in all the most ancient, though misunderstood, civilisations: that of the Hierophant, she who manifests the sacred…

In the performance, this woman-priestess – both officiant and protagonist of the sacred rite – celebrates a special Marriage: the mystical union with Mother Earth, with the trees, the sun, the air, with all creatures, with visible and invisible beings – in a word, with the Whole of which we are part…

Then another passage takes place: the sacredness of the Celebration is such that it overcomes any question of “gender”, allowing every Being, male or female, to take an active part in the ceremony; and so each one – becoming celebrant and spouse in turn – can fully be the protagonist of this reunion with the Soul.

In this Sacred Marriage the declaration I am One… My original Self is the Truth and the Light of the Universe… becomes the ritual formula that seals the numinous promise, in turn the key to passing from the narrow vision of an egotistic, conditioned love to universal Love.

Teri Padma Volini