One must die to be reborn <audio-video work, research> 2016-17


 

ONGOING RESEARCH – Audio/video installation 7:56min LOOP

“One must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person,” this statement stems out of Oliver Sack’s book An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). It is referring to a story about a blind person gaining back sight, but not being able to make sense out of the visual input, in such a way as a sighted person is able to. This person’s world was, until the point of gaining back sight, functioning well in its own way, the brain adapted to the lack of sight and created a functional system. By gaining back the ability to see, this system got interrupted so much that it even broke down to protect itself.

 

What seems so crucially interesting in such a story is that a presumed ‚lack of something‘ or the so called ‚disability,‘ could probably be more often observed as just a ‚different form the norm.‘ Meaning, that focusing only on what is missing compared to what is the ’norm,‘ can be a very subjective and degrading way of looking at something and someone. It might just cover the fact that there could be a functioning system behind the ’state of different.‘
But how can we really understand such a state, how can we feel and experience another way of being if we don’t have the necessary set-up in our brains for it? How can we experience ‚otherness?‘
This is a question that drives me in most of my works. How can we rupture our very personal and subjective perception on reality to such a way that it enables a glance on the otherness? A world that might hide a fascinating reality?

These questions and the above mentioned story inspired me to have a closer look on a world besides the visual. Declaring Scenography as my discipline of art means for me putting space and the experience of such in the focus of my attention. I want to find out what this experience can mean for my work, if it is a material I can use and how it engages in our interaction with space.
An interaction with a space stripped of visuals, consisting of sounds and touch. A reality that is supposed to be much more imprinted by time than by space, which seems to be more sequential in its way of perceiving the world, if compared to the more simultaneously perceived world of sight. In the following month I want to have a focus on how I experience a space and myself in a space by sound and how others do so. And, when I am talking about spaces in this context I am not only referring to physical ones but also digital ones. How could or does a digital audible space feel like in a world where we constantly talk about the huge amount of visuals penetrating us everyday? Would a lack of visual input change our perception of ourselves and the world? Who would we be and do we have to die to be reborn?

 


Supported by CBK Rotterdam

 

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