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Anri Sala
sala
Uomoduomo, 2000

By chance, Anri Sala discovered one of this homeless asleep in Milan Cathedral. The biblical call to convert runs: "Awake, up, you who are sleeping, and arise from the dead." (Eph. 5,14) The person asleep in Sala's video seems, however, unreceptive to any awakening and revelation. The sleeping person has long been a symbol for the unbeliever, to whom eternal life will remain denied and who is, therefore, destined for death. Homeless and only given any protection in God's House, sleeping peacefully, and with that totally vulnerable and in the sight of everyone – the existential paradox of this situation becomes manifest in this sleeping person and shows the human body as the sole revelation.

Anri Sala, * 1974 in Tirana (AL), lives and works in Paris (F)

Anri Sala, Uomoduomo, 2000
video (b/w, no sound)
1:41 min., loop
courtesy Goetz Collection