L’Espace 2004

L’ESPACE

L’Espace is a two-channel video installation that questions how identity and spirituality is formed from the often-conflicted relationship between the self and its environment, juxtaposing the microcosm of the human body against the vastness of nature.

The installation depicts intimate video documenting endoscopic surgical procedures performed on close friends and family in dichotomy with footage of the endless, immaculate landscape of the Chilean and Bolivian Atacama Desert. The erratic movement of the camera navigating the narrow, wet and dark inner idiosyncrasies of the body, versus the slow, still pan, taking in the dry, wide-open, brightness of the high desert.

It is a recreation of humans’ conflicted—and distorted—self-perception: we look outside of ourselves, towards the inconceivable or inaccessible, in order to find fulfillment; but when we look within, toward the reality of our physical existence, we feel confined and vulnerable.

Referencing diverse traditions of mysticism and religion, L’Espace uses the imagery of the desert landscape to exploit humans’ need for syncretism, for reconciliation of the individual with a larger system beyond the natural order. The emptiness of the desert suggests a deceptive sense of virginity or unintervened dignity, and also a false timelessness that conflates past and future. For many, with this isolation comes an ironic sense of belonging, a surrender of self to the greater order of the universe. The project confronts this instinct for transcendence, exposing its superficiality and violently forcing the viewer to literally look inward to the cavities of the human body to realize the impermanence and autonomy of the physical form. This purposefully uncomfortable and claustrophobic self-awareness is created to disrupt, asking the question: do we inhabit the landscape or does the landscape inhabit us?