SEARCHING FOR THE LOCUS AMOENUS
Photo Performance
Searching for the Locus Amoenus is a photographic performance that extends Jônatas’ inquiry into exile as a restless search for belonging. Staged in the wooded terrain of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the artist appears as a solitary, ritualized figure—part pilgrim, part prophet—bearing the symbolic weight of displacement. Clad in taled and tefillin and carrying relics from In Thy Tent I Dwell, he enacts a passage between memory and myth, where identity remains in flux. The handmade bull mask operates as a dense symbolic hinge, invoking the red heifer’s cycle of sacrifice and purification while also recalling Iberian histories of violence and erasure. Subtle references to inquisitorial markers further situate the work within a continuum of persecution and diaspora. Collapsing temporal and cultural registers, the series frames migration not as resolution but as an ongoing, sacred dislocation—an unresolved pursuit of place, meaning, and return.
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