The white crucifix (above) at the Peace Lab is an intermixture of clay, wood and copper and the reflections coming from artist Joe Cassar’s personal contact, visual conception and spiritual upheaval as a result of the recent experience of irregular immigration.
It is a situation, not a problem, as it reflects the crucifixion of all humanity.
The features of the figure are African. Our close position with the continent demands it. However, other world areas have similar situations.
The head is shorn of all hair, as no space for thought is left, not even for the crown of thorns... The reason is that the artist feels the crown of thorns is internal.
This thought comes from his personal conviction that Christ suffered most at the Garden of Gethsemane. The face tries to express the crucified figure’s acceptance of the pain of life, which transcends humanity into the divine.
The figure is in white because white races are also suffering in a different way, hence suffering is beyond the racial. Humanity in suffering as one. The crucifix tries to be beyond racial prejudice.
It is a situation, not a problem, as it reflects the crucifixion of all humanity
The main aspect which strikes the observer is, of course, the missing legs and feet of the figure. The artist tries to answer this by posing the following questions:
Is the irregular immigrant without hands when he cannot develop himself in his own country due to insecurity from religious, racial, and political conflicts? And also when he is further barred from this improvement in the country receiving him? Are the white youth in the developed world not without hands when all they are offered is pure materialism, exchanging the unlimited for the limited?
Therefore, is this throwing the proper tools for spiritual enhancement away? Thus the culture of death: abortion, where the human is cut to pieces, euthanasia, where the machine mentality of numbers declares the efficient and the unproductive, discarding the human spirit in the manual product. Is the modern chip cutting away the hand, that marvel of mechanical and spiritual combination, which is beyond explanation?
Here Michelangelo’s depiction of creation through God and man’s hands comes to mind.
And now the feet, that tool of movement, which transcend the human through time with ever-changing day-to-day experiences, each an instant jewel of life.
Are not the irregular immigrant’s feet being cut off when he is walled in areas in his own country, starved from movement except in the irregular way through untold dangers of desert and sea? He is afterwards penned in wire cages in the recipient country – without feet.
Is today’s technology not supposed to make us freer? Yet it is infringing upon personal freedom, cutting our feet, putting us more under Big Brother control under the new name of ‘globalisation’. Feet are restricted by today’s crime in cities and the recent phenomenon of terror.
ls it true that one sometimes gets the feeling that what was free yesterday is becoming restricted today?
Finally, a word on the crooked cross used. It is taken from a discarded branch of an orange tree, which for a careful observer is anything but straight. For the artist, it represents humanity’s cross resulting from the sin of the mind, which is doubt, and that of the heart, which is fear.
Fear of responsibility for life itself is short-circuiting attitudes, leading to easy solutions. The artist thinks that religious, social and political prejudice resulting from fear is an easier solution than harbouring the irregular immigrant properly.
Doubt in God’s power and love, shifts thought to the easier conception of materialism and relativism, turning the latter into a belief, as propagated by late-19th-century philosophers.
This attitude does not leave time for thinking, but requires immediate, false conclusions.
Fr Dionysius Mintoff is founder and director of the Peace Lab.