Studio Azzurro

Rafts of Feelings (The Imperfect Person)

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CLIENT: AKTION MENSCH
2003

A shipwreck is an unfulfilled act because the ship and her passengers do not reach their port of destination after setting sail. All our everyday aborted actions are shipwrecks too, in particular the many small tentative gestures we make. Shipwrecks of ideas, intentions, feelings.

Losing the port of destination is a painful event. Lost in the water, the castaway is left to his own fate. The loss of the harbour fills us with a pain that prevents all movement and takes away our ability to survive, physically and spiritually.

But not all castaways sink without a trace. Many leave behind tracks and signs. From a mathematical perspective, these are remainders; in psychoanalytic terms, residues; and in the literary sense, relics. This is what surrounds us and what we castaways can cling to. Castaways cling to experiences, following the gestures of earlier victims of capsizes. An ideal raft in the form of tables on which they can climb makes it possible for them to end their journey and reach their destination.

The journey is a departure towards touch, the gesture of a stroke, a fleeting emotion dedicated to a person’s body or soul. The shipwreck arises from the impossibility of fulfilling this gesture and of following the impulse of a feeling to its conclusion; the rafts are an unexpected rescue, a new possibility to let the gesture reach its destination.

To make use of this possibility, we must regain faith in our own senses and rediscover the power and tenderness of touching, the roughness or smoothness of surfaces and materials and perhaps even of our own bodies.

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