Building Sedile Francigena
Via Francigena Arts Trail
Three artworks form the via Francigena Art Trail between Canterbury and Dover:
Monumenta Romana and After the Black Gold are already launched but the third, Polysemic’s Sedile Francigena, production has been put back due to Covid.
The Base has already been built and is in place on Barham Downs and is waiting to be united with its bench seat in January 2022.
When you are a tourist you are interested in yourself. Your comfort. Your experience. When you are a pilgrim, you are interested in the place and discovering yourself through understanding it. – Satish Kumar
From Canterbury to Rome, the Via Francigena is 2043km in length.
From Calais to the Great Saint Bernard Pass, the trail rises 2,469m.
The bench seat is designed to be a map 1/1,000,000th the length of the trail, with 1/500th of it’s elevation.
Christopher Daniel from Polysemic says: Sedile Francigena is a bench that aspires to extend the perspective for those that use the bench. A bench on a walk is a place to stop and rest and to consider the beautiful setting, but potentially also more. This bench uses its form, scale and a carefully chosen quantity of surface mapping to introduce a sense of scale, an appreciation of the bigger picture.
The Via Francigena in England is a small part of something larger…
To pilgrims on their way to Rome, this mapping provides a sense of the enormity of their undertaking. For someone out for a walk it might be an invitation to think further afield, to imagine across greater distances.
Sedile Francigena combines modern digital fabrication techniques in the form of a precision CNC cut timber bench, with ancient local construction techniques – stone plinth incorporating knapped flint and other stone types sourced from places along the route.
