A couple of years ago I did a post entitled the "Key Challenge" on this site. The post moved from the Crossed Keys at St Peter's Basilica in Rome representing the insignia of the papacy, the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and the power to bind and loose on Earth and in Heaven. There were no keys at the Holy See pavilion at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale and in a way that was a shame.
This is the first year that the Holy See takes part in the Venice Biennale and the theme they chose to tackle - the first eleven chapters of The Book of Genesis - was supposed to be interesting as the artists involved were asked to approach it from different points of view.
The Genesis gave the artists involved the chance of playing with themes such as Creation (Studio Azzurro's interactive installation, a sensory experience that allows visitors to enter the world of deaf-mutes and of female prison inmates), UnCreation (Josef Koudelka's black and white photographs) and Re-Creation (Lawrence Carroll's works reusing different old materials and inspired by the Arte Povera).
The pavilion also included works originally made in the '70s by Tano Festa, quite often considered among the pioneers of Italian Pop Art (even though Festa himself wasn't too keen on this label).
Despite the effort and the works of the artists, the pavilion is strangely not touching at all, and at times it leaves you quite cold (it must also be said that the spaces allocated to the pavilion weren't really used at their best).
As an antidote to the lack of inspiring key-related themes at the Holy See pavilion I decided to took the key challenge myself and, prompted by Elsa Schiaparelli who borrowed the symbols of the Vatican flag in her collection inspired by Heaven embroidering Saint Peter’s keys on an evening suit in 1939, I came up with this shirt.
The T-Shirt is pretty basic and after designing a basic key I 3D printed it in different colurs via Shapeways (you can get the keys from my Shapeways shop).
Applying the keys to the shirt via ribbons allows me to move them around and change the colour combination any time I want to, inverting the colour order or wearing just one or two keys (while avoiding to wash the 3D printed keys together with the shirt and damaging them...). Guess this design also goes well with the Creation-UnCreation-ReCreation theme.
Final note: two of the colours chosen for the keys - red and purple - reference the military uniform of the Swiss Guards (the multi-coloured one, not the every day uniform).
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