‘To forget: Of Air’ at Sexuate Subjects Conference
2011
‘In a world where there is a real threat of a war capable of annihilating mankind; where social ills exist on a staggering scale; where human suffering cries out to heaven – the way must be found for one person to reach another.’
– Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
In December, University College London hosted an international, interdisciplinary conference entitled Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics, Ethics. The conference sought “to generate new theories and practices of subjectivity – ‘sexuate subjects’ – through contemporary poetic and political research in the visual arts, humanities and social sciences, and with reference to Luce Irigaray’s theory of ‘sexuate difference’.” Taking part in the panel Understanding Difference: why poetry matters we presented work relating to the Gorchakov’s Wish project.
Specifically, we presented a conference paper extending the ideas that we explored in ‘Constructing Atmospheres: A Phenomenology of the Film Image and Its Relation to Place’. Where that previous paper explores the relationship between the film image, time and the place of its original filmic location, this paper explores the film image as a projection and its relation to the viewer. Titling the paper ‘Time, Space and Empathy: A Material Poetics of the Film Image’, we explored how a viewer’s relationship to the screen constructs a dialogical space: an intersubjective space of ‘shared viewing’ and ‘shared experience’; a meaningful space of imagination, cognition and feeling; an embodied space where mediation, itself, becomes an object of contemplation.
We used our analysis of Tarkovsky’s film image to address the question ‘Why Poetry Matters?’ and, linking our presentation with the conference agenda, made our argument with reference to the work of Luce Irigaray. Here is a quote taken from the paper in which we make such a link: “Bearing this in mind, might the ‘curious’ sense of empathy that we feel in relation to the scene with Gorchakov and the candle, as we alluded to at the start of this essay, be ascribed less to our symbolic reading of the flame held by Gorchakov, as per Pallasmaa’s suggestion, than to our embodied engagement with the screen space itself? What Bird describes, with specific reference to Tarkovsky’s work, as a “sensate membrane of material forces, eliciting from the viewer not only intellectual participation but also physical presence”? In other words, can we appreciate how the address of the eye speaks to us through the fire of the flame, the earth of the stone, evaporated water of the steam as well as that other element, air. What philosopher Luce Irigaray describes in The Forgetting of Air as “irreducibly constitutive of the whole, [that] compels neither the faculty of perception nor that of knowledge to recognize it” (1983, p. 8). (cont’d)
Air. “Always there, it allows itself to be forgotten,” Irigaray laments (1983, p. 8). But have we not been engaging with the air throughout this poet’s journey? Virtually, in the memory of the scene of Domenico’s inflammatory speech. Visually, in the belch of steam, gust of wind, flicker of flame all framed by the long take and tracking shot. Perceptually, in the mediation – presumed transparent, but exposed as, in fact, reflective through its re-mediation by the lamplight of the projected image. Also between us, the material space we share and breathe and through which voice travels to tympanum, across ossicles, toward the oval window of another’s inner ear where we make our appearance, both body and story. In a shared space such as this – a complex construct of imagination, cognition, perception and affect – the air is not forgotten, being always felt.”
As part of our presentation we showed a video piece that worked in tandem with the paper to communicate our ideas. ‘To forget : Of air’ gathers together footage shot at the Santa Catarina Pool in Bagno Vignoni, Italy – the original location for the penultimate scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). The piece, which includes footage shot during return visits to the pool at different times of the year (Spring, Summer and Winter), attempts to capture the atmospheric conditions of the place across time through the moving image. The work specifically attempts to capture the interaction of light, mist, steam and moisture, using the area of the Bagno Vignoni pool as a frame of reference.
As well as a document of the changing Italian light, the work documents more localised thresholds of time, such as dawn and dusk, as well as major yearly thresholds including the New Year celebrations which are accompanied by Fireworks and a live brass band, the sounds of which is stretched to provide the soundtrack to the work.
