Kingdoms of Oblivion

Just as cellular death (not "programmed", but rather self-organized, synchronized, historical) sculpts our bodies in the course of embryogenesis ; just as it later allows to increase the size and modify our bodies, and later on maintains them (when self-organized cellular death wanders, this is called cancer) oblivion is what sculpts both conscious and unconscious knowledge.

We are just as well made of what fell into oblivion as we are made of the evidence of what remains, on which our attention tends to only focus.

Likewise, biological evolution which is a form of knowledge, or to perhaps put it better, which is knowledge in action itself, is sculpted by oblivion. Oblivion of an immense number of living forms that were once present in past geological eras, but of which only a few fragments remain active within us.

As Gaston Bachelard said in his book Intuition of the Instant, "nothingness accompanies us at every step". And part of this nothingness that builds us is oblivion.

Surprisingly, the fundamental function of oblivion in the constitution of knowledge of all kinds has hardly been brought to light, except in therapeutic driven ideas developed by the various psychological doctrines, while neither its normal and daily functioning, nor its role in the development of knowledge has been really elucidated, even in Biology - so far at least.

It may hence be suspected that a deeper attention paid to the mechanisms of forgetting and to what may possibly be the structure of oblivion, could constitute a way of access to the functioning of the mind (human or not) probably as important as dream.

What is proposed here is an exploration of the paths and geographies of oblivion, by artistic means which quite often enabled revealing and expressing what is ordinarily mute. In the specific case of oblivion, the idea would then be to identify aspects that may or may not be unspeakable, but which were certainly yet unspoken

Usine - Photo Wolfgang Panter