The room with an echo...
Lateral ArtSpace
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
2013
There is this indelible feeling of presence that we have: here I am. That is to be self-aware.
This shouldn’t be thought as if there is a substantial self that is conscious of itself. It seems more like a resonance chamber; a room with an echo, in which experiences and thoughts do not exhaust themselves in their manifestation. Rather, they come back and build up, meander around and entangle with others. Of this internal noise the mind tries to make sense of. Similar to the story of the man that talked to his own echo, our mind asks again and again: who’s there?…and responds “its’s me”; and then “who am I?”…“why am I here?”…“what should I do?”, and so on, making up stories and explanations along the way. This questioning forms the inner, secret life that we have, one that we seldom reveal. Unfortunately every answer we provide is just another thought knocking and reverberating on our mind’s wall. It’s not that the answers are not true; it’s that their presence is more powerful than their content, so this disturbing feeling of presence they will never be able to quiet.
I found the people represented in this series on YouTube doing what I was interested in: revealing themselves, making confessions. They are alone, in their most intimate space. They communicate; to no one in particular, so their thoughts are not disturbed by the thoughts of others.
It is very strange to stumble in the mind of another; it feels like a dense, alien soup; a net of ideas in which they are trapped like mosquitoes. Up to a moment; then, we follow the thread ourselves and it doesn’t feel like a trap anymore…
