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I am not religious but creches and other religious dioramas like calvaries and lourdes grottos fascinate me in the same way as saecular train collectors landscapes, fort models, bottle ships or those early music maschines with stuffed birds on top. I just have to go near and have a look.

Diorama, in any form... that is the comparison.

As you know I orgin from Kaufbeuren, as last and only surving kid of a somewhat excentic older couple that cultivated a somewhat strange agnosticism, with the bildungsbuerger love of an education geared at anything away from allgaeu smal town life and prefering a very dull realism as far it did not touch what dad deemed part of international classic highbrow culture.

I did sneak all alone into the catholic monastery church for I thought it was unknown and very interesting adventurous terrain, knowing few stories and cults attached to such places, mostly the pre-christian sagas and myths, famous novels already important before the world wars and romantic ballads. To me the dressed up Blessed Crescencia in her reliquiary was something like Goethe's Bride of Korinth, or even the one of Mary Shelly's Doctor Frankenstein, clearly not alive any more but so pretty in all that finery, sure ready to get up and walk away from the underworld, like an Inanna or Persephone or any Pharao in their painted mummy case. And there it is where my love afair with the dioramas started I guess, before I was of school age, at the glas shrine of the late Crescencia Hoess. It might outrage some christians, espcially as she is a propper saint since 2001 and not just enjoying blessed status. To me she is far more than that poor 18th century nun with all her ailments hoping to go to her heavenly husband and ending up like a long transparent box like a mounted swordfish, displayed in a city meanwhile just dissapointed how low the flow of religious pilgrims is despite the prestigous status change. She is a personal key to the Great Mother outside regular living nature, the black side of the primodeal goddess as I experienced her when I was little and impressable. The next great diorama I recall is the famous music maschine with the American avifauna mounts at the German Museum in Munich. I was transfixed to the half amused dismay of my dad as I did cling to the least mechanical thing displayed until he took a picture of it with his camera. I almost forgot it until I started serious birdwatching and then I just was disgusted at first at me being so positively impressed as a smal girl, for the needless sacrifice of living exotic birds that 19th century people thought of as just fine, as I I stood at Point Pele, watching an exhausted migratory Scarlet Tanager slowly recovering on the tip into Lake Erie. But then I understood, his lookalike in the music box topper was probaply one of my causes I cared for him and his perilous flight route at all, and this long dead red bird facing me thorough glas in dad's old snapshot was not so much different from Blessed Crescentia when it comes to myself.... a part of the puzzle definately. So, yes, churchy dioramas are just like any dioramas to me, they can all transport and transform imagination.