Fabrice Samyn
Sit and See Light as a Feather
2022

Wool, bone, wood, feather, gold
41 x 200 x 140 cm

Sit and See Light as a Feather is a performative installation that invites the viewer to participate in a one-minute, timed meditation in the presence of the sculpture. The installation is composed from different sculptural elements: upon a rug, a stool and a candlestick face each other, with a candle shaped by the assemblage of a human bone and a feather from an Amazonian parrot. Adjacent to the feather and bone construction is a stool produced from the remnant branches of The Fallen Tree of Knowledge, a monumental sculpture recently exhibited at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. On the stool’s surface are traces of bark beetles. The traces resemble smart chips in the apple wood and have been gilded with gold sourced from recycled computers. It is widely known that the deep mining that is necessary to produce technological objects is a continued threat to the environment. The dramatic spread of the bark beetle is causing the death of a drastic part of European forests and is itself a result of global warming
and intensive agroforestry. We keep on having to challenge the Fall of Paradise: the irony of relying on our inexhaustible quest for wealth, communication, and knowledge to the point of destroying its source. On this seat, the viewer contemplates the bone of a human arm. This normally invisible part of our body, kept in the darkness of our flesh, is here overmounted by the lightness of a parrot feather from the Amazon. The heavy and the light, the darkness and the bright are brought together as a reminder of our fragility and strength in interdependency—from opposite sides of the world and species’ spectrum. Without our breath, given by the Amazonian Forest, our personal human life is to be challenged: Vanitas vanitas