Noli me tangere. Understanding the sacred through the experience of place in the postdigital age.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17561/rtc.29.9764Keywords:
Aesthetic Experience, Sacred, Contemporary art, PlaceAbstract
The Latin expression Noli me tangere (in English, do not hold me or do not touch me, depending on the translation and the original language of the edition) is used for the figure of Mary Magdalene in a biblical episode belonging to the Gospel of John. This term, used over time and through different meanings, is related to the irreducible distance between the visible and the truly significant, between presence and its access, the basis of the founding metaphor of the problem of the representation of the sacred in art: that which is present, but cannot be touched (tangi non potest) nor fixed or contained in a form. This research explores how, in the post-digital era, contemporary art and its strategies linked to the development of new technologies activate new ways of approaching the sacred based on the experience of place in the face of the obsolescence of traditional forms of representation, thus redefining the phenomenon of the sacred as an unstable, displaced or even profaned event, but whose symbolic capacity survives and even reaches rise.
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