TOTEM
Totems as metaphysical versions of a social phenomena.
Digital Media Installation
2018-2020
To begin, I develop an overall structure, an initial form to be filled with lives’ material. I want this to be a body, vibrant and alive and at the same time, critical and dangerous, as it can be dismembered, gradually or suddenly, to nothing.
Once erected, the TOTEMS contain themes, archetypes, styles, atmospheres and all the fillings of life’s stuff, the whole. Each succeeding element contains the glory, the majestic as well as the damage and violence of the previous. I shuffle certain elements, seeking balance, until the mysterious emerges, as if seen through a mirror, into another kind of universe, where gravity is inverted and souls don’t fly to heaven, but land on earth.
TOTEM is an imaginary cosmos in which the creative principle is the idea, that we are complex, beautifully colourful and infinitely diverse assemblies of all human experiences before us, and for those who have understood the nonlinear nature of time, maybe of all experiences ahead of us.
I’m borrowing the concept of the ceremonial pole from the Haida and the Nuxalk of the Canadian highlands, to whom they represented, besides mystical entities, social influence and power, and I imagine a TOTEM as a visual composite of personhood, as vertical construct of human energy balancing and focused upward as spires of will and circumstances.
These poles are distinct in concept from the ceremonial pole of the Akis, Nix.... of the Canadian territories, which represent social standing, influence and ancestral history and at times mystical connections. And are intended to be prominently positioned in front of the house.
It is the form I’m borrowing, this elongated spire, a composite of (someone’s) will and circumstance, without much mass, but reaching for the sky. Like its collective form, the church spire, the Minarett and even the pyramidical temples and shrines. The compositse we are : cultural, biological, a repository for ...... remnants ..... but what we all have in common, we re n unbroken chain all the way back to the first living cell somwhere in a warm , prehistoric ocean. Everything that happened since, is somewhere, in some cell or structure, within us. What we re today, compositse of unimaginable complexity, with all that happened before us written into the code somhowe. A thought so big, that it almost unthinkable.