Steel, wood, plastic, tin, aluminium, brass, found objects
65 × 46 x 20
I lay in my bed thinking about this video game where you are a highly adhesive sphere that moves around the world by rolling around and by this movement you gather objects, living beings, household items. If the item is smaller in size than you then it sticks and becomes a part of you but if it’s bigger it can cause some trouble. As objects stick to you you grow, eventually allowing objects that were once hurdles to be picked up, and creating access to areas and objects that were formerly blocked. At one point you start picking up houses, then mountains and then clouds. In the end you’ve collected so much you yourself become a planet, a star, the moon, the world itself.
It makes me think about the correspondence between Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud during which Romain came up with the term oceanic feeling which is a sort of a sensation of eternity, a feeling of being one with the external world as a whole, he argued that this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion. Freud discusses the feeling in his Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). There he deems it a fragmentary vestige of a kind of consciousness possessed by an infant who has not yet differentiated themself from other people and things, a consciousness being produced by a situation like when the infant is hungry and cries, the mother immediately offers her breast with the milk. I guess under these circumstances all this belief and looking for a higher deity is just a longing of something or someone knowing our deepest desires and needs. And a way to fill a loss and a longing is collecting, which initially is a fetish on its own. Maybe collecting is a way to reach the oceanic feeling, being one with the external world as a whole- everything lives, moves, everything corresponds. I move through life and I go through, around and pass all these objects, sometimes I pick them up, sometimes I take them with me, sometimes I copy them, sometimes I restage them, pile up, stack together, or align in a row. Dusty, shiny, rusty, fragile, hard, soft.
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All these things, objects, that I gather and want to put in a constellation, I want to create a support structure that uncovers the human and object doubt, I want to hold everything in a gentle caress, but a see-through caress that lets you in. I put them together and against, I want to allow the possibility of movement and flexibility. I have put them on this carrying vessel, but I want the vessel to be a display to be a spatial grid, I want the grid to expose itself. The grid becomes the frame, becomes the support structure that carries, dismantles and itself disappears.