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Black Box is a quest. An artistic research project about impermanence in human life and those changes that take place on it. A performative journey mainly through still and moving images focused on author’s face and mood changes. A research work about author’s identity in a postmodern society from a highly sensitive point of view. Changes on space, time, identity, image and memory are the backbone of this Artistic investigation. In general, as work on impermanence has been tackled from author’s own perspective, other elements such as space, time, image and memory remain the same study scheme. So, this project far from addressing any concept as an absolute category, heads out from a subjective point of view in any way as a discursive element intimately related to identity. In this way, subjective personal conception about oneself will be a generator and a participant of any concept. The impermanence of life in a performative journey not only through author's face still and moving images but also with sounds and poems born from her hands, are always linked to a black cardboard and fabric box. This element, placed at author´s living room, works as a black box theater in an etymological sense, θέατρονn, place to watch, with some remembrances of avant-garde last century theatre that allows this quest in such a personal way, also related to platonic khôra, that liminal place between visible and invisible, present and absent. The vertigo that human beings feel related to changes, transformations developed by time on our nature, were in some way conjured by photography and cinema birth, where a physical medium was capable to keep time and create memory. Writing maybe was human first medium to keep memory about life, and poems, in this project, evoke a vivid awareness of experience through language chosen for its meaning and resonances in author´s life. At the last stage of this project, the box was also opened to other people in order to enjoy their own experiences and reflections in the box. Author’s research and others images and insights inside the box are collected in a living archive-web that through this work enlarge our knowing on impermanence. For G. W. Hegel, change is the only remaining thing in a world where the subject is defined by opposition to it, and time is the key to set up a relationship between human being and his environment. In these terms, we could declare that Hegelian phenomenology passes through this project, while the philosophical concept on which permanent change has been built, has worked as a demiurge within it. Memory allows human beings to preserve time in any way. In this performative research, at first, the black cardboard and fabric box works as a physical counterpoint to digital images that take what happens inside, but as the exploration goes on, this structure is transformed into a new folded device that is waiting for a new time and space to unfold, probably in a new way, that will enable new memories and experiences. So, Black Box is born as Platonic Dionysus who knows the secrets of nature and its transformations, where the images and what happened in it are no longer there as a sign of its impermanent condition. But, due to its own materiality, as in the Orphic myth, Dionysus can die and be reborn to show human beings the mysteries of the other side. |
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