Katabasis: Negative Hallucination
Commission by Dystopia Sound Art Biennal. Subtexts: Kunstraum Potsdamerstr., Berlin, 2024
A green-screen ghost wanders through a space, reenacting a vermicular katabasis. It lurks and haunts its margins, disintegrating itself into its surroundings through an intensive corrosion. It does not act deliberately, but automatically. Progressively, in his effecting of an obfuscated routine, worms start traversing its non-body, working as an index of the recapitulatory events of phylogenetic memory: a projected anamnesis or backward recapitulation of forms of life. The worm-ghost inhabits the subterranean compartments, working to delocalize itself and its surroundings, much like in a tragic plutonic descent, guiding the crossing of the threshold to an underworld: the world of spectres, the inorganic, and primitive life forms.
In accounts of Negative Hallucination, the subject experiences a gap in reality, actively erasing an object of perception while unconsciously taking into account its physical extension; in other words, the object is perceived into another realm of existence.
Script with text excerpts from Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and H.P. Lovecraft.