Suspended places, a threshold between inside and outside, between earth and sky. The ‘corticella’ and the ‘strada interna’ (‘inner street’) within Santa Maria della Scala seem to capture the breath of time, to preserve the invisible traces of people who have passed through these spaces over the centuries. Here, inhabited still by ancient echoes and nearly perceptible presences, a spiritual dimension opens up where matter fades into the architectural mystery of the place.
This is where the work of the American artist Jacob Hashimoto comes in, like an echo taking shape. His installations, as light as a breath, comprise hundreds of kites made of Japanese paper and bamboo: small suspended presences floating in space, connected by almost invisible threads. Each of his installations dialogues intimately with the architecture that houses it, transforming the environment into an experience that is at once intimate and collective, sensorial and spiritual.
For Santa Maria della Scala, Hashimoto imagines Path to the Sky as a journey, a pathway through the physical to the inward. “I was personally thinking about the Santa Maria della Scala as a portal between life and death and the path to the sky was this way marked through the wilderness of warrens and hospital passages leading to infinity…” Hashimoto creates a parable of the human voyage through time, where each kite becomes a fragment of history, a soul, composing a symphony of individuals delicately connected in a harmonious whole.
Santa Maria della Scala is itself a story in motion. Every room, every doorway, is a page in an ancient book that continues to be written. Thus Hashimoto’s work also becomes a metaphor of travel, of transformation, of connection. A place where the spirit is lifted, where individuality dissolves to become part of a totality, a poetic, fragile yet powerful whole.
For more information, visit the Museum’s website or the Jacob Hashimoto page on our site
