Machina Coelestisis born from a deep reflection about Pomeranian Voivodship’s history and how it affected, influenced, the history of all mankind. There are three starting point for this project. The first is Poland’s admission to the UE in 2004; the second is Johannes Hevelius’s Prodromus Astronomiae and then, the third, is Arthur Schopenauer’s The World as Will and Representation.
Poland’s admission to the UE put another new star on United Europe’s flag, as the sign of his new membership to the European Community but of course, historically, Poland and moreover Pomeranian Voivodship have always played a really important, crucial role for Europe’s destiny. For this reason the star is just a symbol, the official acknowledgement of a role, a place that history had always admitted. That’s why I started thinking about stars and their meanings.
While studying Pomeranian and Gdansk’s history, I discovered the incredible figure of Gdansk-born Johannes Hevelius and his prominent work in astronomy studies, which really fascinated me as I was working on the symbol of stars in history. Obviously, Hevelius’ work on the moon, stars and astronomy has been recognized worldwide since it’s beginning in the late 1600s. So I started studying his works and especially the big treatises Prodromus Astronomiae , Catalogus Stellarum Fixarum and Firmamentum Sobescianum. Observing Hevelius’s Star Atlas (Firmamentum Sobescianum), We can clearly observe the similarities between the UE flag and the amazing representation of the firmament he depicts, where he underlines the link between human history and the stars – ageless witness – giving the name of Scutum Sobescianum to one of the seven new constellations he discovered, in order to commemorate the victory of the Polish forces led by King John III Sobieski (Jan III Sobieski) in the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Following the thread between human history and stars, I arrived to the third point.
Arthur Schopenhauer, born in Gdansk on 22 February 1788. Just like Hevelius, he can be considered as one of the most prominent personalities of Gdansk and Pomeranian Voivodship. His influence, not only on philosophy but on literature, music and art are still strong and of course his thoughts have been basic and fundamental on western modernity. In his book: The World as Will and Representation particularly in the chapter about the Critique of the Kantian Philosophy, he clearly distinguishes between perceptual, intuitive knowledge and conceptual, discursive knowledge. So, considering the world we live in as a representation of the single individual who tries to auto-determine himself, Schopenhauer describes human conditions (and the world itself) as a kind of Maya illusion, a Veil of Maya that man has to rip off, to pierce in order to reach the “real” reality. Reflecting on Schopenhauer’s description of the Veil of Maya and the natural links between human and nature and then between man and universe, I came up with this image of a man throwing something in the sky in order to understand if the sky is real or just a painted backdrop. This was really the starting point of this project, where humanity is seen as the main character of history: history here is created, molded, written and drawn by every gesture and action of each person.
That’s why I imagined these big images, in the Pomorskie Metropolitan Rail, where common people draw the stars in the sky, simply throwing objects (paper planes, stones, arrows etc…) at it and piercing it, creating new holes which bring the light from an outer dimension. Of course, in order to strengthen the link between individual history and the history of mankind, I did not draw accidental holes in the sky, for actually the holes in the sky represented on the screen of the train stop shelters, trace out the precise disposition of stars and constellations that could be seen from that point (the station at issue) in a peculiar, fundamental moment of Gdansk and Pomeranian history.
In this way the links between the UE flag, Hevelius and Schopenhauer are summarised in a very simple image which, thanks to the technique of perforation and to the illumination, results extremely richly and evocatively even if realised with very few elements: sky, stars, people and, in every station, a number indicating the date of the historical moment depicted.