2021 – 2’27’’
The animation was created while traveling and re-traveling within the borders of the same limited area during the pandemic lockdowns.
It is the mapping of a route performed by imaginary creatures, depicting their ever-changing environment, borders, and location.
The creatures are similar to Certeau’s walkers; they escape from our panoptic vision; they prosper without an authority but they do not hide intentionally. They are unseen simply because they elude our gazing frame. They don’t share our world view, so they can neither be understood, nor be controlled. What we can do is simply seek them in the trails they leave behind.
The first voyager is simply a line; its body, its route and its trail are all the same thing just on different points in time. With this aspect, the first voyager is similar to Christine Taylor Patten’s worm which she presented as a “line” in her college years. Pollock quotes:
“I liked the multi-levelled aspect of that – the worm was a line in itself, and as it moved in the sand it drew all through class time. Its aliveness brought time into the equation. We got to see lines being made, some locked into time, some not.”[1]
The second voyager is an amphibian creature, starts as a pebble, then turns into a fish-like creature lastly transforms into a serpent-like being. We watch its world through the points its body touches the world; at first water which immerses it , then ground which brushes its scales.
The last voyager is a flame-like bird, which ignite instantly, flyout its course, and turn into dust in the end.
While trying to understand their world with the help from a map we can remember Proust’s lines: “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is…”[2]
[1] Christov-Bakargiev et al., Tuzlu su, 19.
[2] Proust, The Captive ; The Fugitive.
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