5. Hierophantes

Hierophantes is an interactive installation currently in development, organized around a mirror-object inspired by the caryatid mirrors of Greco-Egyptian antiquity — mirrors whose handle takes the form of a sculpted human figure supporting the reflective disk above its head. On the circular disk, a screen displays, in real time, an interactive animation of the visitor’s body being progressively stripped of its layers — clothing, skin, muscles, organs, skeleton, nothingness — in a dramaturgical arc triggered by physical proximity. The title refers to the priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries, responsible for making visible to initiates that which, without his mediation, would remain hidden. In the work, the sacred revealed by the machine is not external: it is the hidden stratification of the subject’s own image — and, beneath the final layer, the void. A small rite of passage in which the visitor experiences the contingency of their own human form.