Xinrui Li

15th April 2021

In unit2, I focus on the response of emotions in space, in the context of the year-long covid-19, a disaster that has somehow changed our perceptions, both in terms of the way we live and the way we interact with our surroundings. What initially piqued my interest was an interesting observation I made during my research into the Chelsea area, about the differences in funeral culture across cultures, where there is a huge public cemetery, as well as a beautiful park named Brompton Cemetery. But in Eastern cultures, a place like a cemetery is not usually for relaxation, it serves only as a place of worship and remembrance, and I became interested in the Brompton Cemetery because of the cultural differences. At the same time with the ongoing effects of covid-19, many people lost their lives and many others lost their loved ones. During the initial research phase, I had some personal events myself, related to life and death, which triggered me to think more about life and death as well as on a philosophical field.

At the beginning of the project, I intended it to be a place of healing for people who had been hurt by the pandemic, a place where they could honour their loved ones, with more of a focus on ‘remembrance’. But then something changed in me and I wanted to add a more reflective dimension to the project – a spiritual journey, I set the project as a series of installations, building a journey as if I were in another dimension through an immersive theatrical narrative, a journey that I hope to take myself and the audience on a different kind of reflective experience of life. Everyone has different experiences, so they have different feelings about my creation, but I want the audience to be able to fully immerse themselves in the experience of the space, to feel the feeling itself, and see where it takes you.

The work of a Dutch contemporary artist, Levi Van Veluw, called The Relativity of Matter, is a large-scale installation of 350 square metres, presented in France at Domaine de Kerguéhennec, and I highly recommend viewing the VR version of this installation (link can be found later in this paragraph). I was very struck by how this work made me feel as if there was no time or space, but rather a total immersion in the narrative and atmosphere created by the artist as if it were another dimension in the universe, and such feelings are more about some spiritual, metaphysical dimension, which I hope to set this kind of tone in my installations.

https://levivanveluw.com/work/relativity-matter-virtual-walkthrough

I did some research on theories, such as Parapsychology. While the rise of modern science from the 19th century onwards has allowed us to begin to understand and define our world in materialist terms, the numerous fields of study of idealism are another important part of what constitutes the world, as containing a number of existences that modern science has so far been unable to explain in terms of scientific theory and logic, and are quite controversial. I’ve been doing some research on Parapsychology, and there is an extraordinary number of near-death experiences in the world, and there are some very magical correlations in the accounts of people who have ‘come back from the dead’. There is growing evidence that after the loss of vital signs there is indeed a world after death, a world divorced from base matter, that just because we do not know it does not mean it does not exist, that we cannot see it, but that we can feel it in certain experiences. science doesn’t prove but doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, we believe in the soul, so there’s a possibility that you could return to live another life. While we may never fully solve the greatest of all mysteries what happens after death, but more and more evidence are starting to suggest that we might be part of a grander existence that we can’t fully fathom, and our journeys might continue long after we die.

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Consider the idea of Physiognomic perception, which is more commonly known as a perceptual level of intuition, usually found in children, poets, artists and the mentally ill. For example, if you stare at a tree, the branches of which are gently swayed by the breeze, at that moment the poet’s mind turn into fact something that is a natural metaphor, in which one’s passions, longings live melancholy come to life. It is an experience of something ‘unreal’. Through my installations I try to express an emotional state, something that floats in the air, that is kind of pre-language things, which is the stage before language, when an idea comes to your mind but has not yet been translated into words, feel what you are feeling at the moment itself, that is very important what I want to express.

Although I think I should study more theories and cases of spatial empathy, I cherish my own intuitive perceptions that originate from deep within, things like just pop-up in my head, and I feel ‘well, that’s it’, very straightforward and simple, this also remind me of Onomatopoeia Architecture written by Kengo Kuma, he like use an onomatopoetic word to describe his creating process, and I think what I mentioned that pre-language things also can be described by using the onomatopoetic word, like spark-spark at the moment in your spiritual world, I’ll keep these precious things, in my view, it does seem precious to me.

This is an important case the Berlin Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind, I have the same feeling about the architecture space as Levi Van Veluw’s installation, I feel completely and utterly trapped. Actually, in my spare time, I really enjoy theatre, especially immersive theatre, where there are no boundaries between audience and actors, where everything is part of the narrative structure, where the whole storyline is formed and completed by everything around it. In my installations, I want the audience to be part of the narrative structure, immersing them in their perception of the space. The picture shows the moment when I was struck by, I don’t know how to explain my feeling by words, but I do have some language in my head, these diagonal lines and the red light together create an atmosphere that seems to form another dimension from the existence of the building, perhaps a space that is only connected to me, in other words, a space that is purely mine, which can also be described as a spiritual world based on the different experiences of each person.

I got lots of inspirations from theatre, the Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata, who created a dance form called Butoh. For a simpler and more intuitive understanding of what Butoh is, in Tatsumi Hijikata’s own words, he saw his father swaying towards him one day, deep and shallow, on the ridge of a rice paddy, and suddenly the idea for Butoh came to him. Butoh, as I understand it, is an inward glance into the body and the heart of the self, a constant self-reflection, a state of incessant exploration of the connections and relationships between the body and the mind and everything around it, and through a spontaneous form that translates into language, whether it is body language or theatre language. Butoh did give me a lot of inspiration to try to create the whole context of the installation from an introspective way, and I think that the current expression is a bit superficial and I need to go deeper.

References

Hijikata, T., Alber, S., Lenz, I. and Kimmerle, M., 2004. Butoh, Tanz der Dunkelheit. Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

Rosar, W., 1994. Film music and Heinz Werner’s theory of physiognomic perception. Psychomusicology: A Journal of Research in Music Cognition, 13(1-2), pp.154-165.

Blocker, H., 1969. Physiognomic Perception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 29(3), p.377.

Nanako, K., 2000. Introduction: Hijikata Tatsumi: The Words of Butoh. TDR/The Drama Review, 44(1), pp.10-28.

Artaud, A., Corti, V. and Artaud, A., n.d. The theatre and its double.