album of remarks
(work in progress)
In “album of remarks”, I work with images in relation to senses and language. The animals’ and plants’ surrounding environments attract me for creating meaning and sense without using words. I am into this silent worlds which somehow promise beyond the speakable. And I experiment through photography in order to visually sense these environments and transform my own. I create assemblages of the photographs that I took or collected, taking care of the affinities, coincidences, associations and ambiguities among them. I am interested in “sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure”.1
I feel close to the phenomenology of the Baltic-German biologist Uexküll and his concept of ‘umwelt’. He defines ‘umwelt’ (the surrounding world) as the subjective and phenomenal world, peculiar to each animal and it is finite similar to a soap bubble. So when we perceive things, we perceive them through our own umwelt, own sensory tools thus: ‘’what they are before they become covered by our senses, is something we will never find out’’.2 While making room for other ways of perception and creating meaning, this approach allows me to imagine various relationships with other beings.
1 Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things , 2010
2 Jacob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, 2010