Camera Ardens

Prologue

Possunt, nec posse videntur

D. Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles

L'image devient une écriture dès l'instant qu'elle est significative : comme l'écriture, elle appelle une lexis.

R. Barthes, Le mythe, aujourd’hui

To interpret visual and pictorial signs, is to read them in linguistic signs. For these to mean any significant unit or synthesis; to make sense, is to be verbalized. And this proceeds from translation. In this sense, translation is the interpretation of units of a source text in visual signs and the production of the target text in linguistic signs. Semiologically speaking, the two messages cannot be identical for logically sense and reference are neither identical nor essentially and naturally connected.

If we take art’s poïesis either as Anschauung or Vorstellung – needless to say there is nothing mystical about ‘intuition’, and ‘representation’ here embraces all narratives of art production - any art production has surpluses and losses. Here figuration is no different than postfiguration, for having losses and surpluses are inevitable when we speak of a visual work of art; when we signify visual signs.

What befall visual signs when they are told?

Having losses, surpluses and alterations, we do not reproduce works of art when we read them. Any told piece of art can be as independent as any untold, that is to say, given the essential differences in medium, syntax, system of signs, the told and untold are more dissimilar than similar.

Instead of having to-be-perceived, passive but hunger works of art, we call for accumulations of lexis. The sightless are not invited to the performance to perceive through the sighted, on the contrary, they will take part to enrich our experience of a transitory aplasticism, and furthermore, to co-utter the told to reinforce the collision of words.

In the other hand, they may reveal the ruse of modern visual percept; we have taught that the pleasure of observing sculptures lies beneath our desire to embrace objects, but since works of art are still sacred untouchable mundane objects held in art museums, we shall keep our distance with them, unless ‘feel free to touch’ is indicted. 

Hence it should be obvious that this is not an assistance programme, and if there will be assistance, it will be for the sighted, for those who while narrating the seen, do not unlearn the conventions of translation and who write in praise of jouissance of the looked in oblivion of its coexistent suffering.

The event will be documented by the performance crew and will be used in another exhibition devoted to the sightless together with other works Barbad Golshiri has made for them.