Sacred social space, or Natalia LL’s Pyramid. Sacred Arts 2025

On 10–11 May, the London Arts-Based Research Centre with University of Oxford hosted a transdisciplinary conference entitled Sacred Arts: Exploring the Spiritual Dimensions of Artistic Expression and Ritual. The conference brought together researchers from academic centres around the world and, in line with the profile of the organisation promoting arts-based research methodology, writers, poets and artists.

During one of the panels, Kamila attempted to reflect on the role played by the figure of the pyramid in Natalia LL’s art theory, thus raising the question of the potential for incorporating alternative spirituality into reflections on women’s art in socialist Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1979, Natalia LL published the text Pyramid. Art as an inner experience. It was the result of a series of activities – séances in a specially created model of the pyramid of Cheops, during which the artist experimented with her own dream state. Distancing herself from theories about the extraterrestrial origin of the Egyptian pyramids, she nevertheless stated that the impact of this structure on her – and more broadly on the human organism – was marked by power and uniqueness. It allowed experiences that elude rational, everyday cognition to reveal themselves. For her, the pyramid was a “generator or detector of the energy of the unconscious”, allowing an individual experience on the edge of consciousness – an intimate dream – to be reflected upon as a record of universal history and the human condition.

While researchers focused on the feminist and critical dimensions of Natalia LL’s work, the theme of spirituality remained on the margins of their interest. However, the artist studied both esoteric traditions and the writings of Carl Gustav Jung and Catholic mystics, and these inspirations were not without significance for her own theory of art. She sought ways to liberate the communal nature of artistic practice and to achieve understanding beyond political categories.

The actions in the pyramid have also been treated as a symptom of the general return to New Age imagery in the 1970s, without addressing the symbolic and philosophical significance of the artist’s use of this architectural structure. However, considering the pyramid as a universal, elementary sacred space, particularly important in the tradition of speculative Freemasonry as an immaterial ‘temple of humanity’, allows us to reinterpret her vision of art. It also draws attention to the local semantic undertones of the action, which further complicate its symbolic meanings.