Dignity of Shadows by Josseline Black
The Tibetan buddhist tradition includes the practice of making sand mandalas. These are designed as visualisations of gardens for certain deities and designed by monks who long ago used coloured powder made from gemstones. These mandalas function as a meditation and are witnessed in their creation by the community. Once complete, the dust is swept and liberated into the ocean. This is at its core an example of the principle of surrender and also devotion. Can spirit be channeled, understood, and liberated? Taking from this tradition and extrapolating, it can be understood that the human experience requires translation for its exploration to bear fruit in the form of consciousness. This translation in the case of the Tibetan buddhist approach is one in which appointed monks assist in the emancipation of a whole community through a public act of “clearing karma” via allowing the soul to gain momentum by witnessing a sacred act. There is a translation into a geometric mandala and also a translation of the non-visible and non-physical elements of imagination. It is very hard to conceive of the soul as something physical and for this reason is needs to be considered the soul.
As Alejandra Pizarnik, the Argentinian poet wrote once astutely in her book entitled “The Galloping hour: French poems”, “each word is you begging to utter it. Each word is the long invitation to memory.” So too, language, at the level of the word has a relationship to soul and enables it to be physicalised first semantically and then in terms of communication. The tendency to divorce the actual power of the word from the spirit is a uniquely Occidental and post-Fordist neo-liberal capitalist dogma. Most ancient traditions and still in liturgies of the eastern orthodox church as the call to prayer during Ramadan of believers in Islam, invoke the spirt through the word. The question remains: are wishes stronger when felt in silence, and are prayers stronger when uttered out loud? Pizarnik would drive that each word contains within it an ancestry of connotations, belongings, and implications which charge it and allow to make worlds.
This may be true. It resonates. Let us a imagine a situation where all that remains of a person is their name. This is exactly what was experienced by Mafalda Oliveira Martins when she chose to participate in the mass dedicated to those who died without family. All that was left behind were their names. And then what? Where is the picture? We live in a society where the image of oneself at the level of statehood takes the form of an identification photograph (passport / id, etc) and a number (social security number, finances number, etc) and a name. These three things are correlated and in their correspondence structure the rudiments of an identity within a system. The interest here is to consider what happens when the image is not available, and when the number and name only remain. This calls to mind both the tragedies of mass burial associated with war and persecutions and also the dangers of allowing visuality to dominate our world. On the other hand, what is a human being without a face? Are not the eyes the window of the soul? Is this a legendary way of perceiving what Deleuze would call faciality or is it indeed our access point to explore another human being? A name is given. A number is given. Yet, a face is conceived.
MOM has chosen with this series of works to give a face to those departed and in doing so she has done them certain justice on many levels. They have been given a life outside of their own lives. They have been immortalised through being the subject of artworks and in such they have become icons. The gallery here becoming a mausoleum, the art world here becoming a spirituality. Can a face be a site of worship? Can the soul allow the face to disappear into the sands and reappear as a feeling? What is left behind in all of this is truly the dignity of shadows. And how does one read these shadows, and discern the true stories behind people? Perhaps this is the place for divination and the artist. The artist is uniquely qualified to intuit what is necessary to reach a place beyond illusion and the substrata of expectation. The artist as a medium, in the spiritual sense of the word. Gershom Sholem, one of the early Kabbalists and a dear friend of Walter Benjamin astutely wrote, “A philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.” Such prophesying may be reprehensible, as in Judaism, but it must be recognised as possible from the connection of things.” If all things are connected, and we can let that be true, then cannot be ask ourselves, if what we see in Mafalda Oliveira Martins’ work, in her rendering of those past is actually a rendering of our souls as well? Our souls, transiting the skies and lands in search of flight. And the prophecy must of one of light.
-Josseline Black
March 2024
