Page 153 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

Cauterise, Burn to Heal
Healing a wound by cauterising is one of the experiences of fire and its healing ability. And this therapy is, without a doubt, the violent procedure that has best proven its effectiveness at closing wounds.
To prune is to amputate, to exercise the art of controlling growth by making decisions that conduct the energy developed by our mental body. It is a radical activity which has demanded of us the inner violence of a castration and which has led us to the deep irritation of an irreparable pain. A tearing out by the roots, a permanent removal. A torture and central suffering that determines us definitively. A knowing deep down inside that something has broken and that there is no possible repair or reconciliation and that there is no excuse for such destruction. Its reality and evidence is the bitterness of senselessness and the torture of powerlessness.
In the end pain has come to free us from formalism and banal- ity. The sculpture of our time has mingled with this pain like an exorcism that formalises suffering and frustrations, and its hands have modelled feelings and passions with the anger and amassed bodily warmth of the entrails of a murder.
Perhaps these are the ritual behaviours of a transition towards death and the terminal metaphors of certain impulses which emerge from our childhood. Something which has given a biographical structure to our doing and which, at the same time, has turned our works into milestones along a path, and into marks on the territory which ultimately gives meaning and value to our destination.
Written in Salamanca, 13 September 1999.
First published in Arte y Parte, no. 23, October–November, 1999.
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