The Bells - from Liturgical Artefact to Sculptural Installation and Social Memorial. An Interdisciplinary Survey on the Evolution of a Traditional Artefact to the Status of Social Symbol and Cultural Icon

Abstract

Visual Arts, architecture, and especially contemporary sculpture exhibit the bells in the most visible manner, together with their supporting structures, whether functional or not, useful or just display artefacts. The belfries of modern churches become aesthetically and visually autonomous and are visual and sound landscape generators, as created by architects like Mario Botta and Le Corbusier. In contemporary sculpture, the bells become readymade sculptural objects fully integrated into sculptural installation, as artists like Jannis Kounellis, Claudio Parmiggiani, Barry Flanagan does, or even manifest memorial and social attitude, like Zaphos Xagoraris and Marcus Vergette.

The phenomenon of bells as Social Memorial has emerged from the need for social attitude and involvement in the post-war era, also on the background of an evolutionary process of symbolic values secularization of this typology of traditional liturgical artefacts.

The Social Memorial identified today by the artefacts of bells covers from remembrance, heroism, the signalling of a memory archive symbolic or not, to attitude, motivation and social commentary, passing through artistic involvement in contemporary crises - war, suffering and human loss, drama in any situation. It always marks ideas or memory through the sound landscape and the visual structure that inevitably accesses a liturgical reflex of bells, a community memory.

The bell and its adjacent structures, all elements of the art and science of campanology, triggers an anthropological vector and evolving cultural icon, due to already occurred essential mutation through the secularization of the original liturgical artefact into a sculptural object and installation, now a militant Social Memorial or archive of memory.