Distant Feeling(s) #9 | Annie Abrahams - Daniel Pinheiro
Chloé Galibert-Laîné presents:
Distant Feeling(s) #9 (2021)
! The video essay «Distant Feeling(s) #9» is no more in the Video Essay Gallery space !
It is possible to watch at it HERE
Chloé Galibert-Laîné:
Since 2015, the artists Annie Abrahams and Daniel Pinheiro have been organizing online performances during which participants spend fifteen silent minutes together, with their eyes closed, introspectively exploring what sense of togetherness can emerge from being connected via videoconference technologies.
There is a paradox to watching the video Distant Feeling(s) #9 online. As a documentation of an interactive performance, it shows the surface of an experience that can probably only be appreciated when one is actually part of it and yet I am fascinated by the spectacle of these still digital bodies, eyes closed, listening together to the white noise of online silence. I watch them and I imagine what pressure, what stress, what exact flavour of anxiety was colouring their day until that moment. I watch them and I imagine the relaxation taking up their entire bodies, one inch at a time. I imagine a moment of settling down with one's exhaustion, acknowledging it, caring for it. When was the last time I spent fifteen entire minutes relaxing, being unproductive, in the middle of a work day? I would need to participate in the next occurrence of this performance to allow myself such luxury – transforming inaction into an act, a gesture, a statement, by the synchronizing of my fatigue with that of others.
I wonder – does watching this video actually require closing one's eyes while it plays?