TOTEM
Jens Philipp – 2020
Sculpture/Installation.
Elastic polyurethane foam, iron, steel, plastic, acrylic
(materials entirely taken from recycled and reused objects).
Size:100/240/75
Weight: 25Kg
TOTEM is a sculpted installation inspired by recent news about an increasing suspicious number of killings, actually an extermination, of golden eagles perpetrated by unknown people in many parts of Europe and North Africa. Especially in Germany and Austria but also in Italy where the animal is protected by law and in Lebanon where this bird nests, numerous specimens of eagles, have been deliberately killed, even on their own nest during last summer.
Apparently, the intensification of such an atrocity seems to be connected to the false belief that wild animals are guilty of spreading lethal viruses such as Covid-19 in humans.
In the installation Jens Philipp created an eagle pierced by a killing spear but still trying to continue its flight towards the sun.
The wounded animal is still showing all its power and force for which has always been considered untouchable, strong and inscrutable in the history of mankind.
For centuries humans have been tributing an absolute axiomatic respect and distance towards eagles, animals capable of flying higher than any other bird and therefore according to collective imagination almost capable of symbolically flying towards the sun.
As alchemical image of elevation and abstraction, eagles have been considered a gateway to higher spheres of knowledge and to the achievement of higher goals also for personal identity development in life.
Often they have been used or “abused” but only at iconographic and political level as pure or frightening symbols of power.
In Philipp’s sculpture, made with completely recycled material, the wounded eagle turns into becoming a symbol, or namely anew a TOTEM.
The Artist has intended with it to create a powerful natural entity link between the work and the natural animal willing that the public by looking at it will develop a relation with it similar to what a totem also is meant to be: namely a bond to this magnificent animal for the entire lifetime.
TOTEM expresses in this way the need for a new bond between mankind and nature, as it was for instance among the indigenous population of North America, where totems were in use and the eagle was considered as a sacred bird.
TOTEM is a desperate last call to mankind. A call for the renewal of the very ancestral bond between nature and mankind.
The wound of the eagle in this sculpture turns into the wound of mankind itself which is no longer able to establish an adequate and respectful relationship within and with its natural habitat and to safeguard the symbolic that this relation also carries with it.
Today mankind seems to be blind to the mystery and by now unable to fly towards the sun because kept on the ground by its own fears and spears without any respect for nature and its laws.
The wound of the eagle symbolizes in a sense also the wound of the artist in a world where the imagination, the mystery and the symbolic - all essential issues in the artistic discourse - seem no longer to be matters of a ritual exchange within the society and its communities.
