Stupa Duplicator 2010
dome kit, wood, insulation, hardware, sound system
University of Southern Maine, Gorham, ME
The sign of a Hindu-Buddhist Stupa was built into an 1800s New England building that functioned as the University of Southern Maine’s art gallery. Eastern sacred architecture was merged, or conjoined, with Western colonial architecture. Stupa Duplicator was a symbol of the dome-shaped monuments that originally commemorated significant Buddhist teachers through the housing of their relics, also functioning as an architectural modeling of consciousness that serve as representations of the enlightened mind. SIMPARCH made the Stupa dome (the anda) a room to be inhabited as a “celestial vault” for the living. The dome interior, softened and reduced visually with gray wool felt, included an ambient minimal drone by the composer Éliane Radigue. Designed as a mental de-accelerator, the stupa offered gallery visitors a place to be immersed in the drone’s vibrations, or to engage in meditative contemplation.
*Trilogie de la Mort, by Eliane Radigue
