phobia

“ a weight of meaningless which crushes me “ (Kristeva, J 1982)

 ‘Phobia’ is a return to darkness.  Much like the uncanny it becomes a scene of a haunting of the same thing, an in-between state, at the very border of death.   The scene becomes otherworldly, a claustrophobic space where the distance has collapsed to 50 and 30cm gaps.  Is this a protective boundary in which we try to hide or is it a prison we try to fold out of in order to escape? The room is familiar but strange, turned upside down; the interiority is unknown destabilizing our perception of reality.  We are denied sight and speech.  The face is broken down.  But we are both darkness and light and one cannot exist without the other.

It is engulfing us and we mutate and break ourselves to either escape or to exist in the very space that crushes us.

With thanks to:

Tim Stokes, Rosalind Brooks, Alex Marshall Parsons, Daniel Butler, Anthony Arrowsmith, Sarah Tierney, Ellen Evans, Simo Pukkinen, Foundation students.