The gothic masterpiece that is Cologne cathedral was built over a period of 600 years starting in 1248. Built to house the remains of the three Magi, whose relics were bought to Cologne in 1164 it functions partially as a site of pilgrimage. The facade of the Cologne Cathedral has watched over the events of history for eight centuries, with the bulk of the building completed by 1400.
Cathedrals were typically designed using the proportions of the Vesica Piscis to create an architecture of divine harmony and order, in this work the cathedral is seen as a transformational space, a bridge between the earthly and celestial realms.
“The Edifice built by Tarkovsky in each of his films is structurally, semantically and functionally a cathedral” Elena Dulgheru. The spaces inhabited in Stalker, Solaris, Nostalghia are not separate in Tarkovsky’s symbolic architecture, the ruined spaces act as doorways or portals to the infinite, places where timescales collapse in on themselves and human reason ceases.
The form of the cathedral facade has been combined with imagery from “The Stalker” by the prophetic Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky. This imagery has also been fused and overlaid with paintings by Breughal the elder. The film “Stalker” traces the progress of writer and professor as they follow their “guide” into the Zone – an apocalyptic pre Chernobyl landscape of industrial wasteland. Once inside the supernatural Zone the normal rules of physics do not apply, writer and professor are asked to overcome their egos and cynicism and have faith in the journey. The end result will be admittance to the legendary room where a persons deepest desires will be manifested. The film can be seen as a spiritual pilgrimage in to the innermost landscape of the human soul, where all the frailties and contradictions of human existence are mirrored. The films of Tarkovsky contain similar themes and each film contains elements related to the others, this work includes imagery from Nostalghia and Stalker.
The paintings of Breughal are used in the Tarkovsky films as symbols of a pre industrial world and serve as a counterpoint to the despoiled industrial present that he witnessed in the Soviet Union. They also provide a connection to the 16th century, a period of immense upheaval, discovery and change, a century with many parallels to the twentieth century. The three paintings selected here, “Hunters in the snow”, “The Harvest” and “The Herd” all feature in the living room of the spaceship in the science fiction film Solaris by Tarkovsky.
Underneath the structure of the Cathedral partial views of “The Adoration of the Magi” by Leonardo Da Vinci combined with the closing scene from the film “Nostalghia” set inside the ruined abbey of San Galgano in Italy. The unfinished Adoration of the Magi by Da Vinci is a version of this traditional religious subject that is unusual with its depiction of strife and disorder surrounding the tranquility of the Virgin Mary, it contains the duality of life and the struggle for transcendence and harmony amidst intense chaos.
