Ulrike Meinhof Goes To Heaven

 

What happens when a body does not recall that drowning leads to death?

Can a body expire itself through the abrupt cessation of processes of breathing?

Aryan Kaganof’s Ulrike Meinhof Goes To Heaven, in response to these questions, treats water as a fluid cinematic projection space - that translucently blue shifting fluid, holding a figure in euphoric twists that could imply death by drowning.

The slowed undulations of fluids in “womb”, endow the figure a sudden and evolving non-being, an agility that seems lost yet restored as it is lost and restored, again and again in varied harmonies.

It is as though the artist inspects a body of water, and the immersed body itself as a site of agency; where the water is a consciousness in which the figure swims.

And we ask, which body is neutral in the exposure of another?

Could water return us towards perception of the imperceptible, a time before being where language was insufficient to contain the complexity of the experience?

The body here, is in a constant state of becoming, and when everything perishes or the body’s form vanishes, submersion undulates, symbolising the figure’s inseparability from the whole body of water.

Phillippa’s muffled voice gesturing towards non-verbal resonance, becomes an acoustic phenomenon in itself; questioning a hopeful resurrection of the “lost” self that could be drowning or swimming towards the void of time.

And this act of “giving breath” no room, exhalation as expulsion of the occupant of the body, is as a method of concealing oneself inwards thus transitioning to the heavenly plane - that which is beneath the waves of time.

The figure at core of the video poem’s enquiry, is treated as free of convention, as that which exist without its occupant soul, a formless constantly morphing entity; water itself as a space of radical vulnerability throughout this transformation and rebirth.

With Phillippa Yaa De Villiers’ rendtion of Kaganof's poem, recited to create as idiosynchratic orchestration of sound as a liberatory force; her digitally manipulated voice responds with a moving language to the visual poem, which, despite its inherent subjectivity, arouses a further mystification of “the self”.

Through that “self”, symbolised by the figure descending into the brink of consciousness; the poetry modulates the stigmatic occurrence of drowning and possible death (an embrace of the void) as entry to the heavenly.

And this haunting collective of image and unsettling sounds, the voice wrapped in mystery, this gurgling fluid entwined with splashes suspended with moments of the figure’s weightlessness; these are the core of euphoria of a purported heavenly entrance to the unknowable.