Innumerable texts will argument the reasons for a reality that here, I will merely state: in modern society, infinite distractors are withholding from us our freedom and our identity. We forget ourselves internally because we are hypnotized by external occupations.
Going to a place where the tentacles of society have no reach made me aware of this. It is a huge and mighty and careless expansion of water. The pacific is one for herself. We sailed for 18 days along her waves and clouds and sunsets and wind. Apart from fixing something once in a while and eating twice a day there was very little to do. Since there were no distractions on the outside, I would dedicate hours upon hours to the mere act of existing. By apprehending the act of existence consciously the quality of being becomes an act. It turns out to be more difficult than you would think. Before the Pacific, I had apprehended my existence consciously through meditation. However, I knew that if it were to become unbearable I had the possibility of escape. By opening my eyes I would be, again, surrounded by society and distraction. In the pacific, however, there was no such escape. It was in this context that all the writings, photographs, drawings, and recordings of my piece were created. By bringing them together, a story that considers the human mind, my mind, in the process of coexisting with itself, is born.
A selection of those disparate thoughts, desires, and observations that were created throughout the journey were put together into 18 distinct capsules. The nature of these capsules is an interesting one: they are a-temporal, or better: poly-temporal. The dates that document the creation of each piece surface the fact that each capsule fuses different moments. If the capsules are not connected temporally, what justifies that amalgam? The response is that this composition creates metaphors. Things that would otherwise be unrelated are combined met with the assertion that on some point of comparison they are the same. The viewer will address the following question: what is the point of comparison that associates these things? An interest is, hence, raised on that blank space suggested, that space that in the viewer’s conception would normally separate those things.
The dichotomy that a story is composed both by what it says and also by that which it does not was first underlined by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his renowned Tractatus. He says “I believe, in fact, that my work is composed of two parts: that which here appears, and of all that which I have not written. And the most important part is precisely the second one. (…) I think that everything of which people today blabber about is contained and evidenced in my book with its silence about it. And for that reason, if I’m not mistaken, the book will say a lot about what you want to say, but probably you won’t find it said in it.”[1] Those open spaces of silence that the metaphors elucidate are, like Wittgenstein says, the most important part of my story.
It is known that it is impossible to frame a reality made up of an infinite amount of information within the finite and insignificant space of a story. Better, more reasonable, is if words and images are capable of giving a life of their own to the facts they depict. In this way, a much bigger and complex reality is suggested, in which those words and images are only an attempt to distill that story in the best way possible. In this case, a paramount part of this reality, that could only be transmitted through silence, is the deformation of time in the sailing experience. With no milestones in the landscape the mind becomes unable to tie memories to a temporal order. And it could happen that upon seeing the shape of a specific wave you would remember a past in which, while your eyes looked at an identical wave, the hunger of a whole day without eating had been mellowed as the first delicious spoonful of lentils entered your mouth. However, you could not recall the last time we had eaten lentils, weather the day before, or seven days before, or earlier that afternoon.
Silence is not enough to make the story, though; words and images will only give a life of their own to the facts they depict if the viewer is able to tie the capsules to a context that validates their existence. Only if the context presupposes that the trip across the pacific took place in a boat and not in an airplane or on a globe will the temporal deformation be justified. John Berger refers to this in his essay for the book Another Way of Telling, by asserting that there must be a “tacit agreement”[2] that what is kept in silence is carried as a subterraneous stream, it is not present and yet, it is trusted to exist. In other words, the platform where the story is mounted has to be evocative of the discontinuities in a way that indicates that those discontinuities are in a state of silence and not empty or non-existent.
The platform that was more suited for this purpose was the map. This is because the way in which the experience depicted took place is coherent with the way in which the viewer experiences the information in the platform. The tacit agreement emerges from this coherency, and the context fills the silent discontinuities.
One may question the validity of this assertion. Is the map really the best way? How is the map coherent in both layers? To examine this, the structure of the map should be compared with that of a book. In printed books one can easily and quickly browse through the pages. Even though the pages are arranged in a certain order, one is not tied to it: I can skip complete parts by opening the book in a different section. However, unable to order our experiences temporally during the journey, but still needing a feeling of continuity, we let space tie our actions to a narrative. Fixed in the present, we felt a continuity that was spatial and not temporal. The map was the evidence that the boat was moving forward toward a destination; the trail left behind and the bearing that we maintained were symbols of the past and the future. Accordingly, at the core of our journey, every movement was tied to the coming and to the past in the form of an unbreakable chain.
The presentation of the map as a long scroll is a loyal preserver of one very important attribute of the journey: only one part can be seen at a time—the fixation in the present is implied. Presented as a map, the piece also defies the traditional conception of time as the driving factor of a narrative, Instead of experiencing the story from left to right, in the way that the Western world has agreed upon as the direction of time, it moves the opposite direction. The viewer traverses westward, the same way we did on our journey.
The map here appears as a web page on the Internet. Obviating for now the fact that the Internet has the capacity of reaching the widest audience, it is also advantageous in it’s use as a portal that brings together diverse media. Among the capsules, in the middle of the map, a long video recording plays. During 42 minutes, the camera that recorded this video was tied to the back of the boat, and its presence was forgotten as it recorded the events that happened in a time that is rendered thick and slow. Tacita Dean explores this concept in her work with 16mm film: “the static camera positions and long takes allow events to unfold unhurriedly”[3]. The video also emphasizes the question of scale. The viewer will comprehend the environment that triggered these emotions, he/she will fully understand what “no escape” means.
It was said earlier: the Internet allows for the widest audience. In this time when printed media is at the verge of extinction, new platforms and structures of narrative must be nurtured in order to keep our culture from being distracted completely into mainstream entertainment. In the Pacific, I became aware of how much my spontaneous character and innate, raw thoughts were being constrained by a model of being that society always presented as a norm, a model into which I grew unconsciously. Emancipated from this mental oppression, this narrative will be especially relevant to my contemporaries as it points to a space within them that probably still remains unexplored: where the quality of being becomes an act.
[1]. Isodoro Reguera and Jacobo Muñoz, introduction to Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003). Translated to English by me.
[2]. John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling, (First vintage international, February 1995), 285.
[3]. “The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean,” Tate Modern: Exhibition, accessed: 7/30/14, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-tacita-dean-film.
