Guy Vinciguerra’s images expose to our view sites of memorial usually seen only fleetingly as we speed by on our sure and confident way to our destination. Glimpsed occasionally here and there in the landscape, in this space they are brought together in an evocation of what Paul Virilio conceptualised as a ‘museum of the accident’, a gathering of instances that present evidence of the inherent failures of the technologies of our lives, as opposed to the lauding of our efforts at progress. They are individual, personal representations of a communal trauma particular to this era of fossil-fuelled technologies, an era in itself passing. The Sacred has been defined as something ‘set aside’ and dedicated, a discrete fixed point where meaning gains coherence.

In this space lies the opportunity to pause and to contemplate these memorials in their multitude and pathos, saturated with colour and paradox, raw sorrows opened to the public gaze. We are invited to look, sanctioned to be voyeurs. Every feature is in sharp focus, like the heightened reality experienced in moments of shock, perceptions are intense with detail. The sumptuous colour contrasts with the greys and greens of ground and landscape. We are confronted with the juxtaposition of beauty and the banality of objects, of ordinary peoples’ lives shattered by an extraordinary event. The Sacred is unifying, it represents the shared interests of a community, it can inhere in things, in symbols and objects, and in places as power and resistance. These images are Sacred Places.

Words by Koral Island Ward