Tálamo

(2020)

Concept and direction: Juan Dominguez

Light design: Gilles Gentner, Bruno Pocheron and Santiago Tricot

Sound design: Adolfo Garcia

Artistic artistic accompaniment: Julia Rodríguez and Victoria Pérez Royo

Executive production: Manyone

A production by Juan Domínguez in co-production with Kunstencentrum BUDA, Tanzfabrik Berlin in the frame of apap-Performing Europe 2020. Co-funded by Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and Centro Conde Duque-Madrid, Skogen-Gothenburg y Graner-Barcelona. Financed by the program of creation and mobility from Madrid City Council.

Thalamus: eyes thrown into the adventure of perception.

It’s like that phrase I like to quote, from a German poet who said: “our work is based on darkening the darkness”.

Pedro Costa

Thalamus invites you to embark on an adventure: the adventure of perception. It invites us to cross territories barely explored by our eyes, exposes them to a borderline situation between seeing and not seeing, opens them up to minimal ranges of perception, invites the beholder to embrace and develop the optical imagination, to stop trying to name unequivocally what is seen and to embrace zones of experience where not intellection but intuition dominates.

The piece happens in complete darkness. Only after some time, when the eyes get used to that situation of blackness, you start to see something: some blurred stain of light, minimal flashes that are barely caught or that are almost always lost out of the corner of your eye, visual impressions that are difficult to designate. In Thalamus, operates a whole work of destabilisation of visual perception, allowing the beholder to inhabit a wonderful terrain between what he sees, what he does not see, what he thinks he sees, what his own eyes make and the mental images that the gaze evokes and summons. Walking through these terrains, throughout the piece, an exuberant perception is reached and hundreds of images begin to emerge in an unstoppable, unexpected and voluptuous way to the astonished gaze.

The capture of the vision.

Western tradition has conceived of vision as a form of knowledge and domination that separates the subject from what he sees, placed out there in a remote and distant area from which he controls and subdues what he sees. Thalamus operates in the opposite direction: the gaze does not capture the images, it is the images that trap it. Complete darkness and the unexpected appearance of flashes, reflections, visual impressions and images in continuous transformation make it unfeasible for the eye to be located at a distance and to be emotionally separated from them. In contrast to “looking is possessing”, in Thalamus, naked eyes do not conquer, but are fascinated by an exuberant flow of images that are barely glimpsed, almost impossible to grasp.

The visual-affective world of Thalamus escapes this capture and possession by the gaze with the deployment of diverse visual strategies: on the one hand, there are glimmers, sparks and flashes that never come to form a substantive image, that are situated in a strange limbo between what I see and what I manufacture with my gaze, so that I do not know if they are there in front of the truth or if they are produced by my eyes. On the other hand, you see a kind of blurred outlines that prevent the clear delimitation of an outline and with them of a vision that dominates what you see. Finally, when forms appear that with greater clarity allow some kind of image to be fabricated in front of them, they come out in a gush, transforming themselves into each other at a dizzying speed and disappearing in the same way: we have barely begun to glimpse a form, when its unstoppable mutation leads to another form and the emergence of other images.

Instead of separating the eyes and what is seen, the body, situated in a space that seems mobile, changing, in transformation, gives its eyes to the overflowing flow of images, to the observation of what is not usually seen, situated in a range of perception far below what is usual. It is about eyes that look without knowing what they see (a place at the antipodes of seeing as conquest), that look beyond what they have been taught to see, that stop ignoring all the visual effects and images that our own eyes manufacture, which, far from being pathologies, widen the world of the visual. Thalamus invites you to observe what you never perceived: not only the mechanism of the gaze, but even the electricity in the sparks of the optical nerves that cause flashes and brightness in the visual field.

In short, Thalamus hinders the clear vision of open eyes, comfortable and comforting, to complicate things a lot, to offer a vision in the dark in which the eyes cannot be separated from what they see, unable to distinguish a clear border, a vision that, although it is thrown to the perception of a thousand visual impressions, in reality it never ends to know for sure that it sees nor can it close what it has seen once and for all, stop the flow of perception and name what has been seen. A vision lost in a space-time continuum without anchors, lost and fascinated in the adventure of perception.

Exercise of optical imagination.

It is precisely in this liminal space of the glimps that Tálamo unfolds with greater intensity his work in the development of optical imagination, by proposing the simultaneous functioning of a whole series of modes of vision that range from the physiological functioning of the eyes to the activation of imaginaries and memories. It is committed to complicate the look, to multiply the possibilities of the vision articulated with the imagination, to propose a more complex vision experience that includes what the open eyes see, what they only get to glimpse, the very physiological functioning of the eyes, and what is seen with “the eyes of the mind”, that is, the whole world of memories, saved impressions, evoked visual sensations that reside in the memory.

It challenges the usual visual perception by means of several mechanisms: on the one hand, it works with unfocused surfaces. By preventing them from focusing correctly, the eyes are hyperactivated, persistently trying to find the focus that is denied them, which produces ciliary muscle fatigue, which instead of gradually adjusting its field of vision, operates as if by means of small explosions. On the other hand, it makes one doubt about what is seen: often one does not know if the image seen is a post-Rethian image, produced by a focus with greater intensity of light that has produced a luminous excitation that persists as a visual impression, or if the source was there in front of it all the time. Neither is it possible to distinguish sometimes if there are real flashes of light or if they are rather entoptic perceptions, visual stimulations produced by the very mechanism of vision, conveniently stimulated. Finally, in another phase, the exuberance of the images and their dizzying transformation produces an effect of visual hallucination that is truly overwhelming. Here the eyes are not only limited to receiving external visual stimuli, but these trigger a mental activation that summons images from memory, while many others appear in an effect of anticipation of what has been seen, in which the eyes strive to see before the form has been able to be defined. The optical imagination develops through this definitive destabilization of vision, which is invited to inhabit situations unknown to the eyes, making exciting experiences possible.

The fascinated and excited gaze.

This situation in which Tálamo situates the gaze, according to this description could perhaps seem to refer to a limiting experience reduced to a perceptive level, or merely self-reflective in his work on the act of seeing. But in reality it offers an experience of fascination. It promotes a state of consciousness that is lived as a sustained instantaneousness, within a space-time that does not allow itself to be divided or segmented. An ambitious bet of Tálamo is thus that of recovering the emotions of fascination and amazement, recovering them from their abduction by the cultural industry, reduced to the function of being a mere spectacular addictive or sweetener and that is associated to an emotionality understood as the necessary substrate for a convenient manipulation of the public. The fascination in Tálamo, on the other hand, allows us to recover a look lost long ago, which I consider to be a previous step and requirement to learn to look again. Fascination, far from leaving the audience speechless, allows them to concentrate and refine their perception and expand their sensitivity. This is the performativity of Thalamus’ pre-images or visual impressions: it operates on the emotion of their appearance when and where they are not expected, the difficulty of differentiating between perception, hallucination, vision and imagination, or the display in front of our astonished eyes of unusual images in constant mutation.

The work of the imagination proposed by Tálamo is key to stimulate the fascinated conscience. Perhaps Stan Brakhage’s words can explain it more accurately: “In case you didn’t know, magic is performed in the imaginable. The imagined dies when it is the mind that penetrates it and knows instead of believing. Instead of offering a field of self-reflective perception that allows us to know our vision apparatus, what this piece does is to present the thing in all its mystery and thus offer the possibility of a fascinated experience when witnessing those thousand unlocatable visual impressions. In no case does it show the trick, nor the functioning of the system, that would allow to understand in part the fabrication of the visual impressions. As a spectator, one enters and exits the darkness with the perplexity and amazement of having experienced the fascination of not having seen anything concrete and nameable with certainty, but having witnessed (or even fabricated) thousands of diverse visual impressions that do not manage to be closed in image.

Victoria Pérez Royo (2020)

Photos: Luisa Gutiérrez