An interview with
Aleksandra Acic 'Blind Hands' is not conceived using metaphoric approach, but adopting a sort of performative research. When did you get the idea for this work? Idea to use a body as a screen is linked to the previous art project Inscription of Shadow. In this project the Body was treated as inscriptive surface. I made drawings on translucent paper and captured their shadows dropped on the skin. Among them there is one drawing that I believe led me toward creating Blind Hands. It was a hand of my family member that had recently passed away and it was titled Touch of Vanished. This may refer to imaginary touch that recalls personal memory. While video Blind Hands expresses the sense of touch as basic and fundamental human need for contact in current digitized era. Surrounded by primarily visual contents of screen media, we are immersed in digital lifestyle and technologically driven communication. Influence of digital culture upon human experience, perception and subjectivity can`t be underestimated. We are engaged, but nevertheless passive. We are connected, but an uneasiness of isolation is present. Therefore, in this video, I made a twist and placed human bodies to be passive objects, while exploring subjects are `digital` hands. They caress, seduce within repetitive and mechanical behavior.
Aleksandra Acic
artist and director Romeo Castellucci, who in a recent interview has spoken of the "blinded and circular nature of the spectator's gaze". Could you introduce our readers to this concept so important in your art? Since this is a matter of perception, I would like to present Merleau-Ponty`s phenomenon of double sensation in terms of vision. Double sensation refers to the sense of touch. When one hand is touching the other, we experience both "touching" and "being touched". We do not experience this quite simultaneously, but rather in the constant oscillation between two modes. We either feel one hand touching the other as an object, or we feel subjectively one hand being touched by the other. This is a structure of reversibility, where subject and object are mutually intertwining.
Your daily experience is very important for your artist practise and thinking, Aleksandra: could you explain this aspect? Daily experience is not the main key. I would rather say that particular intense and unique experiences which deeply mark our very existence and are imprinted onto the subjectivity, carry the potential as the main core of creativity. These experiences are the foundations where the creative process begins, but it is further formed and upgraded by the knowledge we receive trough perception, observation and analysis of the actuality. About your art, Nikola Suica say "Screen surface is a darkened platform to the viewer’s gaze". We are really interested in this concept, which remind us of the Italian
The notion of reversibility transferred to the eyesight would imply that to see, is also, to be seen. For Merleau-Ponty, the notion of reversibility is the archetype for all subject/object relations. From this point of view, reversible structures define nature of the relation between perceiver and perceived, in the case of video art, between spectator and moving ima-ges. Circularity of the gaze can be understood within this theory.
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Since I was particularly interested in the tactile