"[My] past, though not a fate, has at least a specific weight and is not a set of events over there, at a distance from me, but the atmosphere of my present.” (Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

The philosophy behind the phenomenology of the body emphasizes one’s own body as a permanent condition of experience. The human body is a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. It is a transforming entity that gathers and stores our life inside an aging and changing form very differently than any computational device.

According to the empirical theory of visual perception we understand what we see in relation to the behaviour stimulated by similar situations before. Instead of being able to see what is actually happening in the present, we interpret the situation empirically, screened through our personal history.

Childhood is the earlier experienced state of an adult body, to which we instinctively remain connected throughout our lives. The installation uses people’s shadows as gateways to this lost state. Our shadows become an anthropomorphic lens recalling this previous corporeal state hidden inside our adult form. Interaction takes place on the projection screen, where both time levels are visually linked for a moment. A connection between the child and the space that limits her existence is ambiguous. She is not alone in the dark: somebody moves in the background behind her, controlling her and her route towards our shadow.

programming: Seppo Heikkilä

Production support:
AVEK
Arts Council of Finland

Watch video documentation (QT 15 Mb)