RADICAL ALTERITY
Human experiences in the Information Age are becoming increasingly more deconstructed, multidimensional and contradictory. As global complexities heighten our self-reflexivity, they remind us of the transitional, multidimensional and fluid human nature. We’re moving beyond the Cartesian construct of the body and learning anew about the mind-body processes. In the world that has become occupied with the idea of redesigning the human condition, our bodies are changing, shifting, and a site of constant improvement and optimization.
Everything is connected. Following the collapse of nature-culture divide, we are seeking new modes of participation with nature, inner and outer. Inner work is the condition for human progress, freeing the mind-body processes from outdated cultural, social and ancestral conditioning. By practicing inner work, we answer our aspirations for freedom, to no longer be bound by physical, emotional, or mental, spiritual limitations, disciplines, or demands to assume form, to produce, to make. I am a being in eternal becoming. My freedom lies in a state of unconditional cognitive and sensory clarity. During a period of transitioning and reorienting my practice, my artist focus shifted to the invisible realm, accessible through sensory modes and sense perception. Parts of my practice naturally fell away as they gave space to new working methods. I realized that all along, it wasn’t shapes and forms I was after, but to become the human who I was meant to be. Moving away from forms, I began working with invisible forces of voice and language. Vibrational forces rooted in the rhythm of the body, movement, breath and sound. My creation became a path to self-mastery, pushing the limitations of the mind and the body. Mastering my own reality, my energetic vibration, shaping and moulding, reparenting myself, reprogramming my thought patterns. Shifting focus to emotion rather than manifestation, to inner rather outer, to thought rather than form. Trusting that I’m always in the becoming, never complete, never ending, liminal, in an eternal state of transitioning. Coming to terms with the fluid nature of being human. Rejoining the heart and mind when they were disjoined. Returning inside. In this liminal space, radical alterity emerges.
In 2019 I found Instagram AR filters to be one of the most exciting mediums to think about the fluidity of the self, the body and the cyber-self. These spectral representations, re-imagining our immaterial self, are stretching our imaginary about our bodies and the invisible forces around it. Life is a site of constant creation, where everything continuously moves and nothing is ever static. Human evolution is the eternal unfolding of spirit through matter. A detached mindstate leads to letting go of old conditioning, genetic destinies, forms and outcomes, and can allow space for infinite expansion and rising to ones highest potential.
The embodied human nature becomes key to the complexities and subjectivities in our age – through breathwork, transcendent practices, ancestral wisdoms, we seek new models for our being-in-the-world. The practice of embodiment and inner work become essential to understand human relationships to the multiple ecologies – the natural, the social and the psychic. Aware of the interdependence of everything and our relational consciousness, we are collectively expanding beyond definitions, binaries and linear thinking. There’s now more space for radical alterity, reorientation, transitioning, and hybrid becomings. The self is never static, and neither is the artist practice – it is perpetually shifting, in an eternal state of transitioning.
/
Image credits:
Camera: Anna Laura Cappelletti
Fashion design: Anouk X Vera
Shoe design: Deniz Terli