Dropping - Berlinde De Bruyckere
The exhausted flesh is soft, it glows with a surreal lustre. All is flesh, even the crown of thorns, the consecration of dying. And the hand, the leg, the crease of the groin, the curve of the knee. Flesh of my flesh, we say of our newborn children. The animals know this: they drop their young when they give birth. Dropping to earth like a tree falling, the surrounding trees touching, joining their arms in brotherhood, bending as one, whispering.
The worker who hovers at the bedside of these weary bodies, this woman with a name like a lay sister or fairy godmother, has chosen for her ritual a material that burns and fades like a will o’ the wisp or a prayer, here cooled and shaped into a second skin, a shroud of great refinement and fidelity, which neither conceals nor lies.
This flesh is ours at the moment the blood leaves us, the moment we drop, alone or into the arms of a creature just as vulnerable, stricken with the same disease. The moment the struggle ceases, a fusion of entrails, the furthest point of decay, when the muscle becomes muzzle, the skin vegetable waste, the death throes a dance, and the wound an eye.
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A place so abandoned, it seems excluded from the world, populated by creatures as fragile as glass, left for dead behind an invisible boundary, whose very wounds no longer run, jewels sealed with nails, red windows congealed by the cold.
The studio, though, is bright and warm. In it, we can talk to the wax figures, touched by their dizzying, delicate presence. We can talk to each other, too, witnesses to a disquieting alchemy. In this place, a woman shrouds and liberates, shrouds herself and liberates us.
Caroline Lamarche (translated by Howard Curtis)
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