Space + Something - The Intrinsic Movement



Her text Space + Something is about visualizing the physical equivalent to an intrinsic movement experienced at Il Faro di Capo Grosso, an abandoned lighthouse situated on Levanzo, the smallest of the three Aegadian islands on the Sicilian coast. Though having been empty for a long time, she felt the place was alive, open and welcoming, yet full of integrity and something else that was hard to explain. The text is presented as a dialogue between her and the lighthouse as a tribute to their quiet relationship.



Parallel perceptions are not new phenomena, nor unique. We experience them all the time. However, understanding these multiple perceptions is rather complicated as it requires a lot of self-understanding and digging into one's past. Nevertheless, the subject of parallel perceptions has since my lighthouse experience become a great interest and is now the underlying basis for almost all my work. I call this the study of the Intrinsic Movement.

The intrinsic movement is that small, yet sudden moment when something jolts our perception and becomes a direct cause for our thoughts to change direction or to become an additional source of inspiration. It is an intrinsic movement because of its inevitable inherent physical chain of events that links the receiving body - through example, sight, touch and smell - with the thinking mind. It is a moment in which we emotionally react and send signals to our mind and, consciously or subconsciously, reconnect it with a former experience giving us that parallel perception.

The physiology behind emotions and feelings is tangled, as it is part of the philosophical mind-body problem concerning the nature of the mind and the mental states/processes concerning space, place and atmosphere. However, ever since childhood, we have stored inner and outer experiences of shapes, forms and materials unique to each one of us, that have become an inventory of memories overlain by emotional and sensory content. The ability to understand our surroundings – to organise, identify, and interpret sensory information – is therefore always influenced and coloured by all former experiences and cultural knowledge, making our perception of space and objects a personal interpretation based on memory. The body, being the bearer of our senses, is the fundamental interpreter of these experiences in that it evokes a physical reaction - an emotion. In turn, the emotion makes us feel a nonverbal movement in our mind - a feeling. The mind can then look for a thought or a story, to attach to the feeling to interpret the situation.

The challenge in my practice is to find the moment of 'emotional movement' and to identify the feeling to materialise it. By uniting the mental with the physical order, the understanding of the intrinsic movement assists me to better translate an experience into physical objects and also lets me come closer to the original and inspirational core. It is a question of combining the experiences of my physical body with my thinking mind. The immediate perceptual experience becomes an essential condition for my imagination within my artistic process.

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