Domestic Spirits

Domestic Spirits is the first collection by Relik Objects: five sculptural candles unfolding through a cycle that moves from morning to night, towards a new dawn. Time, rather than progressing linearly, turns. This circular movement runs not only through the day, but through natural seasons, psychicologycal states, and human life. The candles thus take shape as archetypal presences.

Domestic Spirits is a set of five presences materialising as sculptural candles. Each one corresponds to a moment of the day, a season, an archetype and a specific atmosphere.

Photo: Andrea Kasap

Many cultures once understood the world as alive, inhabited by presences dwelling in rivers, forests, mountains and fire. Over time these sensibilities were dismissed as superstition as modern life learned to measure, optimise and standardise everything around it. In doing so, objects gradually lost their density.

Photos: Andrea Kasap
and Giacomo Alberico

These spirits reclaim a lost intimacy with the material world. They are mischievous entities,each with its own temperament, habits, and inclinations: playful, defiant, or contemplative; some demand attention, others prefer to lurk in the corners of a room. They represent a cycle of temporary states, human conditions that emerge in specific moments of life.The forms of the candles oscillate between different visual registers.

Their silhouettes evoke small ritual figures or household idols, yet their colours are deliberately bright, almost synthetic; as if ancestral statues had reappeared through the aesthetics of late consumer culture.The candles are produced in collaboration with Cereria Introna, an artistic wax workshop active since 1840 and still run through generations of artisans.Each piece is hand-made in their laboratory in Bari, southern Italy, using techniques refinedover nearly two centuries.

Not characters, but states of being: surges, excesses, stillness, dissolutions; temporary configurations of human experience that settle into matter.

Relics from forgotten timelines