Foucault's afternoon

Isn’t the perception of the other a mirror of ourselves? 

Through communicating with the other, we perceive ourselves. Creating the other, mirroring every movement or word. It’s a body language, language of signs, language in the language. 

Man’s quest to trace the history and philosophy of language and semiotics are fascinating. 

There are two very interesting theories about the origin of language, one of them relating to imitation and the other to our need to express strong emotions like desire and fear. The language is strongly connected to the image and the visual world, as our need to communicate and create the other in order to see ourselves ? “The borders of my language are the borders of my world” said Wittgenstein. 

The name of the project is related to Michel Foucault’s works and his fascination with mirrors and reflections and their connection with the curious slippage between the familiar and the unfamiliar, known and unknown, inside and outside. “There is something in emulation of the reflection of the mirror: it is the means whereby things scattered through the universe can answer one another.” Foucault explores the dissolution of the ideological bounds separating the Same and the Other, a phenomenon with important ties to mirrors and reflection, as indicated by Jacques Lacan’s renowned essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (1949).¨ (Danielle Manning, (Re)visioning Heterotopia: The Function of Mirrors and Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Painting)

The painted cuts depict how in “conversation” we create the other and vice versa. The other is a mirror in which the reflection depends on you and what you draw on the white canvas. The body is the canvas, the mirror itself provides a metathesis of visibility. 

*(Most common usage of metathesis is the transposition of sounds or letters in a word but, here it is connected to the concept of a chemical reaction in which different molecules exchange parts to form other kinds of molecules.)