Other View

2021

*heads and drawings made on ALUO - Academy of Arts in Ljubljana

In collaboration: VN gallery, ŠKUC Gallery

Thanks: Jože Barši, Tomo Stanić, Voranc Kumar, Tia Avsec, SCCA

Foto: Neža Knez, VN Gallery, ŠKUC Gallery

Through a ten-day “suppression” of sight (10 days, 24 hours a day), I try to move into a different sphere of perceiving the world, space, and the people around me. Sight gives us a certain distance from space; we experience objects superficially. When faced with “blindness,” we feel our own body and everything around us differently. The experience of blindness does not so much describe the impossibility of using sight as it does the difference in the structure of the sensory world, of relations and distances within it (specific to my blindness, and not to the blindness of someone else).

With this work, I want to bring the viewer closer to my experience of “blindness,” to confront them in various ways with the remnants or documents of my experience, and thus create conditions in which the act becomes a story. I do not represent the experience of the lack of sight nor do I take on the role of illustration, but I present my blindness as my own. I get to know my space, which I can describe through other senses. I cannot be blind like a blind person, and the viewer cannot be blinded as I was. The blindness of the blind person, my blindness, and the blindness of the listener/viewer of the diary are not the same, do not wish to be the same, and cannot be the same.

Installation: plaster heads, drawings, video, sound, book, light objects

The project opens a space precisely in the difference between the concept of blindness and the materiality of the document, in the impossibility of matching words and materiality; act and document. Any fixation would be fatal. In three different portrait studies, I focus on the translation from sound/memory/touch into form. The drawings on the wall explore how the gaze of the other affects me, the one who is blinded. From sound to drawing, to memory and image... The books are a kind of documentation of the experience, records from specific situations. In the larger book, which we can also call a sketchbook, there are scanned handwritten notes and sketches that I made during the ten days of “blindness.” In the smaller booklet, there are records from twenty-four days (7 days before blindness, 10 days during blindness, and 7 days after). It is a study – descriptive sampling of experience, or DVI – where the alarm rings ten times a day and you record your current experience. Three different sets of experiences are presented – before, during, and after the darkness.