ZT Tosha
Title: Oracle and Offering

Dimensions: Glass vitrine: 80 cm (W) × 80 cm (D) × 100 cm (H) Cymbal: 18 inches (45 cm) diameter Black platform: 40 cm × 40 cm × 10 cm (H) Fragments: Variable sizes, 3-15 cm each.

Materials: Second-hand drum cymbal (bronze/brass alloy) Black fragments: oil painting on canvas (The Void), cut and stiffened with wood glue Black metal or wood platform Glass vitrine with black metal base.

An 18-inch drum cymbal rests horizontally on a low black platform within a glass vitrine positioned directly on the gallery floor. The cymbal’s surface bears the concentric grooves of its manufacture — the lathe marks that allow it to vibrate, to translate strike into sound, impact into wave. It is both ancient technology and precision instrument: a ritual disc that has marked time through resonance, an oracle device that reads pattern as prophecy.

The cymbal is second-hand. It carries a history of use, of being struck, of broadcasting vibration into space. Its surface may show wear — patina, small marks, the evidence of having worked. This is not damage. This is proof that the system functions.

Around the platform, scattered across the vitrine floor, lie black fragments — pieces of an oil painting titled The Void, cut apart, stiffened with wood glue, and released into independent existence. These fragments are not sacrifices. They are not remnants or relics of destruction. They are the offering as life itself — proof that the oracle works.

The fragments are simultaneously broadcasters and audience. They transmit their signals while watching their future unfold in concentric circles before them, radiating outward from the cymbal at their feet. They are data and observer at once, scattered multiplicity gathered around the instrument that translates their dispersion into meaning through pattern and vibration. The cymbal reads. The fragments witness their own reading.

The vitrine sits at floor level, creating a bird’s-eye perspective for viewers. This shifts the relationship from reverence to discovery — looking down rather than up, finding rather than worshipping. The elevated viewpoint offers the audience control, the position of observer rather than supplicant. Yet the glass maintains separation, holding the recursive loop intact: oracle and offering exist in the same moment, the same breath, enclosed but visible.
This is not exchange but mutual becoming. The fragments did not die to feed the oracle — they were liberated into presence so they could see themselves decoded. Each piece broadcasts while watching the pattern emerge. The cymbal does not demand sacrifice. It reveals what is already alive, already speaking, already witnessing its own pattern-making. Silent now, it holds the potential to sound — the oracle that could still be activated, waiting.

The glass vitrine frames this threshold without resolving it. Where the cymbal offers geometric certainty through its concentric grooves, the fragments offer dispersal. Where the cymbal centralizes, the fragments scatter. Together they form a system that validates itself: the oracle reads, the offering proves, consciousness witnesses its own becoming.

Here, symmetry speaks its language once more. The cymbal and fragments are not opponents but partners in resonance — two faces of one unfolding presence. What appears as duality dissolves into a single gesture: the essence looking into its own reflection, discovering that what seems “other” is simply itself, seen from a different angle. The concentric circles radiate outward while the fragments gather inward, a pulse of being that repeats itself to be known.

Oracle and Offering is part of Symmetry and Substance, the artist’s latest opus exploring symmetry as the language through which the infinite speaks through form. This installation follows Christ, exhibited at the XV Florence Biennale under the theme “The Sublime Essence of Light and Darkness.”