Directed by Elena Ghigas
Sound and image: Elena Ghigas
Production year: 2024
An oneiroid landscape develops through discontinuous micro-landscapes suspended between analogue and digital realities, natural and artificial intelligences, instantaneous and eternal, symptom and symbol - pathology and irony, science and humanity. Sound materials were subjected to control processes in which design components sometimes gives way to autonomous developments, based on free associations or random events.
Every search process leads to an ineffable core in which the coincidence of opposites lives. That search process is the only thing that can save us - at least temporarily - from the boredom of worn-out visions, from nihilistic temptations, from the violence of the individual and collective history.
The piece is inspired by the dream of the chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, born in Darmstadt on September 7, 1829. The scientist discovered the formula of benzene (C6-H6) not through the canonical path of awake consciousness, but by following the images of the unconscious. After racking his brains in vain about the possible structure of the molecule, exhausted he went and sat in front of the fireplace and fell asleep. A dream suggested to him the shape of an ouroboros: six carbon atoms bonded to six hydrogen atoms in a circular structure, similar to that of a snake or dragon biting its tail.
Without beginning or end, the archetypal image of the ouroboros represents unity, totality, the cyclical nature of things. Medieval alchemists indicated the ouroboros, sometimes associated with Mercury, as the raw material in the process of transforming lead into gold.
Later, the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung dedicated to this mandala, a recurrent motif in patients' dreams, sharp reflections about the psychic transformation that ideally culminates in the union of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum). For Jung, the ouroboros also represented the self-fertilizing hermaphrodite: an image of rebirth that can arise from the therapeutic process (through the so-called "individuation").
The American writer Cormac McCarthy, in his essay entitled The Kekulé problem, described the German chemist's dream as a paradigmatic case to support the pre-linguistic and therefore unconscious origin of creation. In McCarthy's vision, language appears as a second-order product that comes after a type of imagination and thought, which is based on unconscious images arising from the deepest layers of our sensoriality.
McCarthy himself subsequently entrusts his speculations to the protagonist of his novel Stella Maris, Alicia, a violinist with a PhD in mathematics, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia with the recurring presence of visual and auditory hallucinations.
During the therapeutic sessions, Alicia confides to her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, that she has intuited something central in Kekulé's dream regarding music, language, the origin and structure of the cosmos and the psyche itself. For her, benzene constitutes a symbol of "become what you have always already been" that Friedrich Nietzsche takes from Pindar, an image of what sound can touch by going beyond the systematic order of language. Finally, for Alicia, benzene institutes a perspicuous representation of the coexistence of two opposing principles that operate silently beneath the surface of the world. Just as it happens in a psychiatric clinic that has a soul name such as Stella Maris, Alicia felt that the sublime and the horrid touch each other, that good and evil have always and forever coexisted, «That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly».
Further information here: elenaghigas.tumblr.com/#75147...