In 1961, in the small Spanish village of San Sebastian de Garabandal, four young girls had an apparition of the Virgin Mary. They entered a state of ecstasy in which they became completely unaware of their surroundings and sensory perceptions. Reportedly, witnesses would pinch the girls, pierce their skin with needles, lift them up and drop them onto rough rocks, and yet they remained entranced. The light and presence of the Virgin is all they claim to have experienced. Twenty years later, in the town of Medjugorje, Bosnia & Herzegovina, six children also had simultaneous visions of the Virgin, with similar ecstatic qualities. 

‘Noema’ represents my search for the presence of the Virgin Mary in these two locations.

Noema

In early March of this year I travelled to Sicily on holiday; the day after I arrived, Italy announced that it would become the first European country to enter a state of National lockdown in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic. I carried with me ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’ by László Krasznahorkai, a novel set in a small, unnamed Hungarian town where, from the beginning of the it is made clear that an ominous change is looming. The weather has been unseasonably cold, trains are becoming increasingly unreliable, menacing groups of people are collecting in public spaces, and, acting as a catalyst to chaos, a circus rolls into town advertising an exhibit of “the biggest whale in the world”. From here on out tensions rise, defence mechanisms are tested and any semblance of order the town’s inhabitants once found solace in begin to decay. 

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Michael Swann