The Temple Papers 3.0
— 3.01 —
There is poverty in this place, or at least remoteness. Burnt walls speak of ceremony and reverence. I would like to know, who prays here, and when they congregate. Who left the picture in the window?
RITUAL / CEREMONY / REVERENCE
Flickering candles on a blackened night. Snow-capped peaks background the solitude. What makes us feel sanctuary in ideas outside of nature? What makes the trees I touch and the grass I stand on less than the image of a god no one has witnessed?
REMOTENESS / BLACKENED / INTANGIBLE
The char of the candle sends prayers upwards. Places of worship are sanctuaries of belief, but who leads and who follows? Smoke and fire are two eternal ingredients which some have used to distinguish us from others.
PRAYER / MIRROR / SMOKE
Is prayer the escape from the conditions of living within the labour of the everyday? Systems of control that promise new utopias, a code for life, and the eradication of poetics. How can we be creative within the stare of ‘Man’s’ god?
SANCTUARY / COLOUR / ILLUMINATION
The Western god is intangible and a liability, ‘he’ is purely a mirror where man preaches to himself and projects his colours and views onto others.
MAN IN GODS MIRROR BE GONE
— 3.02 —
Our Western image tells the story of power. Its structures are placed into physical, natural, virtual, and psychological terrains. With power, progress is championed. Is progress slow violence?
CONFUSION / CLASH / DOMINANCE
Outside of power is a choking haze of submission and disbelief—zones of admiration and determination to systemically overwhelm. Follies are designed to blur our eyes and muffle our ears. Are we too tired, blind, and ignorant to challenge our minds?
DISBELIEF / ADMIRATION / ACHIEVEMENT
The damage casted on others is indexed by colour, gender, status, sexuality, physicality, ethnicity, biology, and neurology. Who decreed others are there for us. Who is the 1%, and when did we enable the commodification of mind, body, plants, elements, and land?
Legacy / mark / mountain
Evidence in view is the power of nature. Nature’s power is visceral and beautiful, constantly changing, and viewed for millennia. Nature’s power is inclusive, a contrast to our ability to flatten and enslave.
TENSE / DRONE / SINE
Does nature’s ability to leave monumental marks drive ‘Man’s’ desire to do the same? ‘Man’ in his mirror says, my legacy is a mountain range. Valleys, crevices, boulders, landslides, and gapping plains are nature’s monuments, a stark contrast to ‘Man’s’ rusting pillars.
MAN IN GODS MIRROR BE GONE
— 3.03 —
As we sit in the atonal composition of the labourer, the promise of wealth drives us forward. Our debt and waste continue to grow, as nature crumbles under our weight. Progress is never limited, as systems of enclosure tighten their grip.
CONSUMPTION / PROMISE / COMPOSITION
The rusting sheds of past economic boom lay strewn as vast pornographic graveyards. The construction of landscapes creates the lie of what’s natural. Raised paths ensure we don’t sense tremors and oscillations, removing our ability to feel.
OSCILLATION / REMOVAL / LANDSCAPE
Why do we walk with such blindness when our failures are happily signed and memorialised? Can we de-landscape and leave the clearing as a distant memory, regrown and populated with other ideas?
MEMORIAL / CLEARING / MEMORY
Many mask their behaviours to fit within the scriptures of society. Hiding your identity from yourself and others leaves a pool of tired pain that swells the belly, and aches the back. When can we remove our masks?
SCRIPTURE / SOCIETY / IDENTIFY
To sate our consumption, the factory floor has become ubiquitous. Whilst economic rationalism reduces our world to templates, columns, and rows.
MAN IN GODS MIRROR BE GONE
— 3.04 —
A brutal home amidst forced habitation. Love is last seen smudged into the threadbare carpet. The only view is the place of work, a rusting metaphor of demise. Tower blocks occupied by farmers are vacated and repurposed by developers.
INDUSTRIAL / REPURPOSE / THREAD
The banality of life is masked by the glorification of experience and the splendour of projected images. We scroll past the death of our digital utopia as old cultures resurface through the cries of generational trauma. Can we live together otherwise?
BANALITY / SPLENDOUR / VILIFY
All around are monuments to unknown obstructions, whilst plateaus of belief diminish in size. The back light is the new iconic blue where dreams are streams of images generated through systems of coercion.
ICONIC / DIMINISH / PLATEAUS
They say the largest number is infinity, yet our world is finite. One is the only number that will reconcile the balance sheet. When reconciled, can we burn the sheet one last time? mmmLiving together otherwise is the initial and final equation in the riddle of life.
RECONCILE / BALANCE / NUMBER
Returning to the love last seen galvanised in the mould of the shower, we find a home where people convalesce, building resilience for the post-capital dawn.