Thursday, October 16, 2008

Reflections of a Lost and Found Self in The Midst of a Collaborative Art Installation

As I sit here writing, I ask my self: what have I to gain? and where have I lost?


In the beginning I thought this event was to be integrated and distinctly minimalist. Four columns, four series of projections, darkness and a lit up triangle with slow fluid descending from above. The show was this and plus or minus equations that filled up the space. In between the columns, whirlwinds of tension blocked the participants. The air was dank and cold. Life had just fallen, crushed by giants, onto the floor. A disaster had taken place with the kind of destruct that eliminates space. The quiet had pushed into the floorboards.


And as I walked a foot, stepping carefully onto the floor, I wandered into some vacant place in my self. I felt an emptiness that is different from space. When I speak of space, it is not empty. It is filled with expansiveness and molecules and energy. Emptiness is scary. It is void of any thing, as I know it. No wonder all those plusses kept arising. When I think of what space means to me now, I fall to the floor. I feel my body being pulled to the earth. And I can not stop this.


As I continued to walk, a glow of two walls with the tip pointing at me began to ask what I was doing there. At first I did not listen. I kept pacing around the columns. Then I heard it again. She didn’t call my name, but I knew she was calling only me. I glided toward her with my weight on the floor. I stepped half-way around the structure and found a third wall, the supporting wall. I peaked through the openings. The air increased and suddenly I felt like I was at the beach gazing into the faraway sky. Drips of clear fluid slid down thin strings into sand. As I stepped onto the sand I felt the layers falling off. I felt alone and naked, warm and alive. I reached up to touch the fluid and found my self. There I was glistening back at me. The fluid slowed around my fingers as they met each other for the first time.


One and three does not mean three minus two nor three equals one. To be in collaboration is to remain unique and complex and to integrate, inter-mesh, fall softly to the winds.

2 comments:

Lana said...

Emptiness is an impossibility. The day I realized I've always and would forever have me was a strange and wonderful day.

Tara Maria Ford said...

there are two kinds of emptiness (and probably more depending on what way you want to dissect it). some might say you have to experience emptiness to begin to know yourself. emptiness is a kind of unknown, a spaciousness that allows for the spirit of life to spring.

the other emptiness is just empty, void of anything, unfull.

one is a mysterious depth of being and the other is superficial and purely physical.
I think that's what you are saying, you thought that the superficial emptiness was possible to live inside your being, but then you realized it does not. it is just a facade.