Hostia
Alphonse de Lamartine wrote: “Inanimate objects, do you have a soul?” In a somewhat similar question, the photographer Romain Baro looked at an object that is both simple and invested with a unique power of incarnation within the Christian rite: the host. By consecrating these small discs of unleavened bread, the priest takes them, in the artist’s words, from “almost nothing” to “almost everything”, that is to say, a piece of the “body of Christ”, according to the consecrated formula, shared with the faithful at the moment of the Eucharist. As a non-believer, Romain Baro has documented the making of hosts in order to approach this mechanism and understand how the religious universe fits into the contemporary world.
In Latin, the term hostia designates the sacrificed victim. The hosts that are distributed during masses are symbolic victims, reminding believers of Jesus’ gesture at the Last Supper. Most often they are smooth, but some are adorned with fine inscriptions in relief, when they are larger in diameter or are produced for special celebrations. In these cases, a whole vocabulary of forms and signs is used, ranging from minimalist motifs to richly detailed figures.
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“Variations on the host”, Pascaline Vallée
