HEIMA

Winter 2019 – 2020. Location: Seyðisfjörður, Iceland.

Sense of Home, of being lost and found in the same infinite time.

Found:

A sense of security, absurdity, trusting people. Playfulness. Harmony and acceptance of all the aspects of being. Ground. God. Sense of community. Adaptability. Accepting pain and suffering as part of growth. Forgiveness. The difference between fear and intuition. Intense vulnerability. I am nothing.

Lost:

The notion of linear time. A sense of boundaries. Need to control people. Guard.  The concept of existential guilt. Sense of need approval from others. Sense of individual identity. Need to label the things which I cannot fully understand with my intellect.


Returning to myself. Seeing myself without the psychological burden of everyday safety. Paranoia of being harmed by another human, expecting something bad to happen, to oneself, to one’s home, to one’s belongings to one’s family. guarded. survival.

Perception of value is ambiguous.

Valued objects. Valuables. Values as in morality.

Ownership.

Safety.  Survival.

Tenues Par / Held by 2020

Conceptualized & performed by Jessica Doucha (SA) & Cecile Lassonde (FR).

Photography Fabian Fuchs (GER)

This multi dimensional work delves into numerous layers of philosophy, geometry, symbolism and storytelling.

The work is fundamentally about intimacy, connection and notions of time. Thematically, we speak universally, in vernacular, about sameness. The same sea. The same species. The same drop of consciousness in the infinite ocean. Our work speaks a language that contains no borders. It is a human quality to express compassion, tenderness and empathy that bridges distance between our temporary islands. In our capacity to effect and be affected by human interaction.

As a site specific, durational performance, empirical data relating to time, space, location & temperature become intrinsic to our visual language. The ebb & flow of the tides, the  human cycle leading to death, can it  signify the possibility of reversal of time, a return to ones origins?

Where does the eternity of time traverse against human mortality. Is spiritual oneness, interconnectedness contrasted to our isolation, remoteness, a distant as we perceive it to be?

There is glass bottled filled with Icelandic sea water. The label on the bottle reads, “I AM NOTHING.”  There is rock on the shore, it is adorned in gold leaf. There are two figures with golden hands, protected golden feet, they are embracing. Are we held by gravity, the water, the weight of gold, each other, a memory? Does our body weight displace the ocean water adding to the rising shoreline?

The exchange of body heat keeps us warm, keeps us safe from reaching hypothermic temperatures. We become an hourglass against the backdrop of the frozen nordic Fjord.

In ‘The order of time’ by Carlo Ravelli, writes about ‘the arrow of time appears only when there is heat. The link between time and heat is therefore fundamental: everytime a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved… The first principle of thermodynamics is related to the conservation of energy. The second is the fact that heat passes from hot bodies to cold, never the other way round.’

What is this eternal current that moves between us? For a moving object time contracts. Motion in relation to what, to stillness? How can we determine which of the objects, energy, humans, landscape moves, if the motion is only relative? We are existing at a location in space, a point in time. What happens to that energy when there is separation between to events in spacetime, from A to B? “A duration can be associated only with the movement of something, with a given trajectory. “Proper time” depends not only on where you are and your degree of proximity to masses; it depends also on the speed at which you move”

We are interested in the quality of time spent, time held, time shaped together in this eternal embrace.

Nordic winds

Collaboration with Fabian Fuchs (GER).

We went for a walk, down to the shore. The wind picked up. It was strong. Much too strong to swim that day. In fact, it was rather difficult to breathe.

72 poses

Collaboration with photographer: Apolline Fjara (FR), currently living in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland.

The camera used for this project  was an Olympus pen F. Double exposure on film (ilford 3200).

This series of images was made with the early photographic studies of movement in mind, inspired by the work of Eadweard Muybridge from the late 19th century. How would he describe the movement & motion of someone lost in time & space, the motion of a time traveler? As we move on the Earth’s surface, our planet is traveling around the sun, inside our Solar system traveling in an infinite incomprehensible space. Time is curved, curling & waving, a linear sense of time perception is lost. 

Apolline had begun the process of conceptualizing the project before we had crossed paths. At the time of my residency, I was exploring movement based procedures through the act of walking, standing, lying down, running & gestures in response to gravity. These practices are based on my education as an Alexander Technique practitioner. When Apolline approached me to ‘perform’ these concepts & explorations the collaboration was seemingly preordained, as if the projected timeline of the body of work was already set in motion. There is something to be said about the way in which there is a symbiotic connection of artistic expression beyond time & space. Through our intuitive collaboration we are imagining & embodying an existence beyond space time. For Aristotle, time is nothing other than a measurement of change. If nothing changes is there no time? That ‘when’ & ‘where’ are always located in relation to something hence we are able to locate ourselves in relation to the expansive universe. What about the Newtonian sense of deep time? One that is mathematical & absolute. Time that flows independently of change, both internally and externally, how then do we locate ourselves here, there, when & where? The pictures are the result of double exposure on black & white 35mm analog film.

The full roll was exposed for the first time with pictures of images from a book about time, astronomy & relativity theory with a full 35mm frame camera. Apolline started by scanning the illustrations & diagrams, reversing them into a negative format, projecting them onto a large screen & then photographing the projected images. This time consuming approach to the body of work adds to the conceptual gravity of the project from its first conception.

The roll was then exposed again with a half frame camera, with pictures of my movements in a dark area, light only focused on the body. Light & sound become other aspects of abstract time based measurement we play with in this series. The location was an ‘empty’ abandoned silo. We had one independent source of light in the center of the nucleus.Through illuminating the body’s movements & gestures, experimenting with speed & stillness, clarity & blur.  Sound cannot be heard in these still images. The body’s language & double exposure of sketches, graphs & diagrams illustrates this abstraction of time. Just as the sound of an airplane can be heard, before visually seen, we are sending out vocal signals to the contained space we occupy, the resonant loop bounces back, there we are located in time & space.

The roll was developed with high agitation rates to increase contrast, so the marks of the double exposure are really discrete. That way, each frame’s marks nearly disappear & blend with the black background. Full stripe of the film can be then considered as one image, with different exposures blending into one image. Each composition was left to chance, combined with the playfulness of order & chaos.

Don't be a stranger, share your thoughts, let me know what's on your mind...