KU

Guido Dettoni modeled  with wax, the eyes closed, a SPOON.

The artist has not yet authorized its edition, having until now only reproduced some pieces in silver and wood as artist’s proofs.

Years after its creation, in Barcelona, psychoanalyst Antoni Pons analyzed the sculpture and the relationship between the author and his work for the purpose of discovering its identity. 

A careful search and repeated psychoanalytical sessions revealed that SPOON’s identity consisted of a two-headed function: the physiological one, as a  spoon,  and the sacred one as a ritual mask, both necessary to discover what is latent and recover the concept of “total nutrition”.

During a session, Guido Dettoni remembered he had pierced in 1967 a spoon,  converting it into a non-spoon.

The hole prevented the food from being kept for one mouth only. The hole, the void, nullified the spoon’s original function allowing us to see through it becoming also an invitation to change, to let it go, to not hold back…

non-spoon

The remembrance of the “non-spoon” made Guido Dettoni aware of the need to recuperate the physiological lost function and reveal the sacred function. He represents it by morphing the void from the “non-spoon” to the hand holding SPOON so that the movement of both of them leads to the ritual mask.
  

Because of its function, every spoon is an entity rooted in the collective unconscious of the language, the Latin and the Germanic ones in our Western world, in which it materializes. Therefore, the psychoanalyst looked for both the Proto Indo-European root of the Latin words, cucchiaio in Italian, cuchara in  Spanish, cullère in French, cullera in Catalan, colher in Portuguese, spoon in English, löffel in German.

The root for Latin words is ku- denoting all that is concave, receiving and containing; the root for Germanic ones is, spe- denoting a long piece of wood; in German, the root of löffel makes reference to the lips, another dimension concerning, eventually, the breastfeeding, the taste, and the language.
  

The feminine and masculine nature expressed by each root, as well as the Sumerian ku-g which means all that is sacred, i.e. original and pure, brought Guido Dettoni to change the name of SPOON with the one of KU.

Later on, other meanings were found -and many more will be from now on but one stands out: KU is also the name of a protein that repairs human  DNA.
  

The animated video he has created becomes part of the whole work of art and also shows the original sculpture shaped in wax within the void of the “non-spoon”.