There are states that cannot be put into words. To try to describe them is like pressing a butterfly into a herbarium.
Familiar states: between sleep and waking, thought and speech, intoxication and sobriety. And there is something greater: between life and death…
These BETWEENS do not leave us alone. It seems that revelation, clarity, and the essence of things are hidden there. It seems that just a little more—and you will enter, you will touch it, you will finally understand…
But then: either you wake up, speak, sober up, come alive—or you fall asleep, remain silent, become intoxicated, die.
Once again, you have slipped past it.
The most important moments of transition are beyond our ability to comprehend. The origins of the universe, of life, of the human being are examples of this.
Something happens in the process of transition that leaves us with a profound amnesia.
In therapy, one way of bringing something back from amnesia, whatever its cause, is through provocation: placing a person in a similar environment, creating sensations resembling those associated with the forgotten experience.
This project is an experiment—an attempt to place the viewer in a state that is normally inaccessible to conscious memory.
We are accustomed to the beating of the heart. Yet we hear it from the outside, through the “drum” of the chest.
From the inside, however, instead of metronomic beats, something entirely different can be heard: noise, whistles, gurgling, the sound of liquid moving…
Physiologically, it is simple. The work of the heart as a pump, the pulsation of the atria and ventricles, the opening and closing of the valves, the sound of blood being moved through the body—all of this is what each of us heard during those months when we already existed, but had not yet been born.
Could this be why so many ordinary sounds of everyday life—the sound of rain, the murmur of a stream, birdsong, the rhythm of wheels—can simultaneously soothe and disturb us?
Could it be that they do not pass unnoticed because they are fragments of a single polyphony, the soundscape of what once was “between worlds”?
Can a recording of the sounds of the heart restore something of what we experienced in the womb?
Can these sensations place us at a point of singularity—the one moment when there is already being, but not yet birth?
Can such a state awaken memories?
Text written for the project in 1999.
PROJECTED / EXHIBITED
December 24, 1999 – January 24, 2000
Ural Museum of Youth, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Group exhibition Three Dots Above I, within the international arts festival End of the Century on Voznesensky.
June 2001
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
4th Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale, KKIМК.