untitled (Herd)

The correct order of the seating begins to dissolve at the back of the large hall. The objects (subjects?) arranged in rank and file suddenly revert to the natural behavioural pattern of a herd and flee like a pack from the room built with thick walls.

St Pachomios founded the first monastery of Christianity in Egypt around 325. His rules for living together are characterised by hierarchical submission, uniformity, discipline, strict order and obedience. Pachomius’ disdain for free anachoretism also seems to have been the motivation for this way of life behind high walls. In the Rule of St Benedict (around 540), those who do not submit to order and do not cultivate “stabilitas loci” - i.e. those who are not settled - are branded “monachoi gyrovagi” = “wandering monks” and insulted (“All their lives they wander up and down the country, always on the move, never constant. It is better to remain silent about the miserable way of life of all these people” Ch.1). The wandering monks in their ξενιτεία - k’seniteia, = homelessness, these wandering birds, who roamed God’s creation almost freely like animals (there were also the so-called “hoi boskoi” = “grass eaters”), embodied the opposite of what the monastic system and regulated society, starting from Pachomius, had set out to do.