Twinnapse, Artissima, Torino, Italy, 2013
Twinnapse was inspired by the Reflecting Room, a mirrored space shown at dOCUMENTA13. Over the course of 330 hypnosis sessions inside this space, as part of the Hypnotic Show, the room started to be inhabited by imaginary situations such as this, that became transferred from a purely mental state to a documented one over time.
"Ere Babylon was dust, / The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, / Met his
own image walking in the garden. / That apparition, sole of men, he
saw. / For know there are two worlds of life and death: / One that
which thou beholdest; but the other / Is underneath the grave, where
do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live / Till death
unite them and they part no more...."
Prometheus Unbound. Percy Shelley
The typewriter office world is an anti-synaesthetic world where all letters strike the same note, a monochrome, monotonous world, repetitive rituals, OCD. But in this mental zone the mind may begin to wander, one begins to think of the other self, the process of individuation multiplied, the one that could have, should have, would have been: diving into the universe of 'ifs', regrets, remorse, expectation. Perhaps there are resonaces with Cocteau's Orpheus in which the mirrored self becomes the portal to the afterlife, the underworld. The merging in the mirror of the reflected self becomes a way of embracing death, whereas in this film it is an act of recognition and then reconciliation with the dreaming psyche. The splitting of the self is the manifestation of the doppleganger, not just as a fictional other self, but as the sensation that one sometimes has of seeing oneself reflected in a mirror, but then realizing that there could not have been a reflection. Seeing oneself as a doppleganger is an omen of one's own death.
Vardoger, in Norse mythology was a double that would precede the self and his/her actions, almost as if the typing on the type writer is a precursor to this digital double bind that we find ourselves, tied up in behind the same QWERTY keyboard, but in a different manifestation from mechanical to electronic. Echoes of which can be sensed in films such as Tarkovsky's science fiction flick Solaris (1972) in which there were "manifestations" similar to doppelgängers on a space ship. Towards the end of Twinnapse, the bipolar or schizophrenic membrane is pierced and the self is once more whole, congruent.
Twinnapse: Limited edition
Acquired by
1) Fico Museum with special mention at Artissima
2) Videoinsight
A/P retained by artist
