Inversions and Peculiarities

​Hi David,
 
It’s a pleasure to meet your virtual acquaintance! After a bit of the ineluctable delay of having to attend to a rather overwhelming degree of things concerning my health… here I am resurfacing to my own stream of consciousness pondering over the theme of dissent.
 
I have been reading on and off Joan Fontcuberta’s Pandora’s Camera. Photogr@phy After Photography. And I thought of sharing with you this rather riveting excerpt of his in one of the essays taken from Edgar Morin’s La vie de la vie. It goes like this:
 
            Every gaze implies a blind spot on the retina; every visual system involves
            an area of blindness that is the necessary counterpart to the area
            of elucidation. 

In this light dissent finds itself within these premises in which validating a peculiar way or manner of looking at things... and the stronger and deeper we delve into these actualities, the greater the blind spots we induce. As we immerse ourselves into the recesses of particularities and specificities, we also lose a lot. Or in a sense it's much like our perception and how its keenness fluctuates at certain periods of times and is condition based. The volatility of the whole matter still provides more crucial elsewheres and these unstable things in line with dissent is something I always find myself inevitably drawn to.

​I'd like to talk to you about Manila on another occasion. Allow me to just gather my thoughts in a more cohesive manner. In the mean time, I'd like to end this post first with an open-ended possibility of a quote in German which translates as "Utopia gets better and better the more we wait for it." I believe I have picked it up as an excerpt from one of those books I've been reading under the contemporary art, urbanism and cosmopolitanism umbrella. Somehow, don't you think that we as artists with our own set of imagined/created/induced/gestured utopias (which extends from aesthetic motivations down to the peculiar socio-political contexts and other transgressive motivations we fall into as we do our art)? Our so-called utopias, whether private or not, offer a sort of resistance on our end to the immediate environment and ecologies we interact with whether positive or negative. And each one will have his or her own set of inversions and peculiarities that could never be put precisely into words nor even gestures but rather just fleeting instances of constructs that can either evolve or just disappear.

In the meanwhile, I'm looking forward for our next interaction... and hopefully it comes with more clarity from my end.

Cheers from Manila,

​Gian
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