HANDS IN THE WATER, HEAD IN THE OCEAN
2022
Our bodies do not end with our skin, which becomes apparent upon entering the element of water flowing through us, penetrating us, changing us. Our intentionality reaches far beyond us in time and space, just as other matter and intentionalities press into us. Does water have its own desires and fears that penetrate us? 2022
The realization that one never fully succeeds to grasp the fleeting matter, the other, by painfully observing the constant gain and loss, grasping and immediate escaping in endless repetition. The hand attempts to fathom its properties, appropriate them and fails over and over again. The bodily experience of touching and feeling is combined with the material imagination, and grasping enables an understanding that goes deeper than looking at its form.
The materialised and re-imagined memory fragments come into being in the present moment, acquiring, as we acquired at birth, a death sentence by imbuing the kōzo prints in sea water taken from the Atlantic Ocean. The baths forged a transformation of the kōzo through a figurative exposure to loss and grief – leaving traces of minerals on them, remnants of the past: an alchemical sublimatio. The bittersweet experience of pleasure and pain, as exemplified by a word of Sappho’s creation: glukupikron. Everyone is a memento not only of loss, but of the longing for love that makes loss ache.
The ongoing photo series “Hands in the water, Head in the ocean” (2022), explores the transformative potential erotic grief holds – using the allegory of the open waters. The classicist Anne Carson (1986) unravels desire as a three-point circuit in her essay Eros The Bittersweet (1986): The lover, the beloved, and the difference between them that produces an absence that goes, paradoxically but inevitably, hand in hand with sensuous connectivity. The difference between self and the other, the lover and the beloved, creates a boundary, an insuperable, yet ever present absence. By bringing together the notion of eros and its specific relation to the ocean, Stefanie Hessler (2022) speculates about whether the hungry longing for a radiant, absent other triggers a deep fear of the loss of control over nature – and further postulates a fear of the erotic qualities of the ocean. The simultaneity of deep desire and all-encompassing fear of being imbued, washed over, and consumed depict the conflicting feelings that hinge on the fear and desire to transmute and dissolve of self in and through the ocean – as the other. Evocative of a scene in Clarice Lispector’s novel An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1969), in which the protagonist Lóri solitarily enters the width of the Ocean at dawn, thus opposing a great indescribable fear of the ocean – more so, of figuratively connecting to the other. Her immersion into the element of water demands a loss of control, a full surrender to its qualities. By accepting ultimate unknowability of the open waters, her fear turned into desire, further turned into pleasure.
