Umbraculum, a place of retreat, solitude, where time in the past returns like an old mirror, distorting every silhouette, every visitor, each landmark, like an invitation, pure and simple to the meditation of life that “unwinds” almost film-like. The exhibition does indeed give a feeling of the human condition that is simultaneously melancholic and nevertheless calming and stimulating. The industrial jigsaws of a different era can still conjure up the barbarity of the Inquisition or the French Revolution, instruments of torture, machines to cut into pieces the dismembered bodies bathed in blood. But there, the saws are definitively out of action. Only an invasive sound continues in all the chapel, resounding between the arches and the walls of this space that the artist wanted as solemn as possible. These noises are the memory of the activity and the violence of the murderous machines. 

Such a droning worthy of the repetitive music of Steve Reich, one also has to think of the sutras read and reread ad infinitum by Buddhist monks. Above these infernal machines, life with its most ordinary aspects is suspended on the ceiling: wheelchairs, crutches, tripod canes, all ennobled by their covering of thousands of Coleoptera (beetle) shells. There are even these new little walking frames that one sees so often anywhere in Japan and that very elderly people use to walk, their backs completely bent due to the absence of calcium in the body. 

This forest of prostheses, gleaming thanks to the colour of the beetles as beautiful as emeralds, gives each one the possibility to readjust to the world, to find lost mobility. It is an invitation, hope offered for the reconquest of one’s own body and hence of one’s spirit. Thus is reached the sign of a code of ethics championed by Jan Fabre, between yin and yang (even if this formula appears well-worn), between the low, these cutting saws, and the high, these prostheses for rehabilitation, for the efforts to combat and tame disease, all forms of handicap, physical or not, for that matter. The life cycle is a perpetual renewal; the role of the artist just perhaps consisting in giving a bit of dignity and elegance to the play between life and death.