No Image, No Camouflage

Video, color, 14.27min
Camera, sound: Laurențiu Coțac

In an idyllic natural landscape, a strange shape emerges from behind a hill and moves towards the camera. This amorphous shape appears to be two-dimensional, its contours filled with a digital image, as used in Adobe software to signify a missing picture. After a while, the creature stands up, taking a humanoid shape. First, the pace is slow, mimicking a nature documentary in which the camera waits at a distance for the animal to enter the frame. Once this convention is established, the picture cuts to a closer framing, in which the creature is comfortable enough to be seen up close, almost posing for the camera. The shot changes again when the creature jumps into a tractor trailer heading for civilisation. This time, the camera is very near, and it becomes clear that it is handheld by the protagonist herself. A horseback ride through an orchard follows, then a new close-up, in which the costume, previously a digital surface that concealed something, opens to reveal grass and flowers growing out of the humanoid shape.

“The artist, but also her female identity has disappeared behind the camouflage, become invisible and ineffective. But the figure, even though hiding in plain sight, shows that a disappearance is not possible,” writes Anja Lückenkemper in the curatorial statement for the exhibition Keep Forgetting to Forget Me, where this piece was displayed. The suit I wore in the video, made of a chroma-type material often used in shoots to allow for the background to be digitally replaced, here permits a reversal: it emphasises the background, while the character in the foreground tries to evade identification. By using a pattern known in photography and cinematic post-processing to signal a lack of a digital image, the pictured body draws attention to the camera that shoots it. The digital camera and the pattern pertain to the same lexical plane and are charged with the same violence under the sign of objectivity.

In the introduction to the book Perhaps It Is High-Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match, Armen Avenessian comments on a Jacques Lacan seminar about the other’s desire, noting: “we do not simply desire what the other has or hasn’t got, but we desire the state of being an Other, an othering, becoming a stranger to oneself and others—literally alienating them as well as ‘ourselves’. A desire for the xeno?”

Through body language and costume, the piece reintroduces a question that pervades most of the works in this book: what is the relationship between the image of my body as a woman and the image of the world around me? The title of the work is an attempt to capture the dilemma of representation: no image no camouflage ever suggests giving up the possibility of a non-political representation of the human body. Instead, it is a representation of this impossibility.