ISSUE 01: What Is This Foolish Desire
La Dame à la licorne: Mon seul désir (The Lady and the Unicorn: My Sole Desire/My Only Will)
As it turns out, désir throughout literature, philosophical texts, and legal parlance in the early French Renaissance could conjure multiple meanings: volition, intention, free will, and choice. Thus, French medievalists would argue, À Mon Seul Désir might translate to one thing now but likely meant By My Only Will then. The woman remains but is no longer a vessel for sense-perception. The interpretive slippage between desire and will, self-control, or choice becomes the sixth, innate and autonomous sense.
Meaning-making is, in and of itself, its own desire.
As the video cycles, the dance slides further toward unease, and it becomes increasingly necessary to start projecting a narrative back onto the scene.
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Why is this happening? Why would an Italian man put an adolescent girl through this?
For Laxe, partying isn’t pure escapism; it’s an ecstatic, religious-like experience—a worldly kind of mysticism, an atemporal limbo. Rather than depicting a traditional post-apocalyptic world like the one in Mad Max, Sirāt portrays life as a labyrinth or a cave in which the characters get lost, some forever.
Brit Barton on
Niloufar Emamifar at Progetto
Emamifar’s practice is so adamant about its placeness that questions of displacement, liminality, or paralysis become apparent. The object’s embedded labor—or what might otherwise be noted as its context or meaning—is meant to transcend the physical into the ontological. And it does.
It is not always melodramas of loss crazily returned to as the center of being. It is not always a desire for possession or for being possessed. It is not always compensation for lack or wound, a desperate thinning out of personality that gets created in the near compulsive return to the optimistic fix. It is also the desire to be delighted, and you know what that leaping feels like.
“I think there is no unadulterated way to read Die Klavierspielerin after having watched The Piano Teacher, such is the power of the image to which the text must submit, thus it perfectly lends itself to echo a dom/sub-meta-analogy.”
Due to the one-way mirror, in its unilluminated state, the photograph is obstructed by one’s own reflection and that of the surrounding room. Once illuminated, the photograph is clearly revealed, but direct observation is blinded by the spotlight.