photos: Vibeke Jensen

Camera Obscura, first presented in New York in 1999, and toured the world, is a landmark art installation bringing together an Artaudian poetic with a contemporary sensibility. For this piece the Theaterlab gallery is divided into two chambers: camera obscura and camera lucida. In the dark chamber, a living body is transformed by projected images of human scars and wall surface details. The effect is surprising and unsettling. The installation in the white room presents an array of visual and sensual experiences. Visitors will see, listen, recline, and meditate upon our fragile physical membrane. Our skin. Which is the same as the world around us. We are not separate. Our skin is not what separates us from the world, but rather reminds us that we are made of the same stuff.

I am facing here the unspeakable of the corporeal experience. When I first thought about this article, I believed it would be easy to describe the experience of Camera Obscura, the installation I conceived and performed in collaboration with Vibeke Jensen last year. I trusted memory; I was sure that I would have access to it at any time to recall the thread of emotions and perceptions I wanted to name in the writing process. I’m well aware that to write I need to shift my position, to find a different distance from the object I am writing about in order to make it available to the other. However, in that distance which the writing imposes on me, I lose something; and the truth of my feeling turns into a theory too far away from the object of my research. I should make of myself a poet and distill the body of the word to recount the event that has given word to the body. I should turn the white page into the black stage, that shadow’s space where things are brought to light; and then to turn the word into the body which is exposed - like in the theatre - to the other’s gaze. Thus I was resting; laid on one side in a black box, a naked body illuminated by the light of a slide projection from the neck to the pelvis. A torso. -from Truth in Flesh: Cure of the Gaze by Orietta Crispino, 2000