HEAR_THE UNHEARD
With all of the power of knowing and the sense of being alive, we encompass within us every breath of our existence, taking leaps of breaths before taking another. We are born innocent, the sense of right and wrong, to know or not to know and the extensions of it are all man made inventions. What isn’t a man-made invention is the sense of belonging to a relation, no matter how anonymous it may stand.
This dialogue generated when I have started a research on the ghost fishing nets. I left for an artist residency almost a year ago and I was searching for a material which should be relevant to my subject that was “missing persons around the country”. I meet the coordinator of the olive ridley project which was set up by a group of Marine biologists situated within the Maldives working towards preventing entanglement of Olive Ridley’s and other marine organisms. They aim to actively target the origin of ghost nets using information gathered from a concerned community. They also rely on observations around the Indian Ocean of poor fishing practices, in particular small or large scale netting methods or any methods deemed detrimental to marine organism survival.
I visited his place and gathered some ghost nets to use them as my art material. This material inspired me a lot. So, I wanted to write something down about them. Because they seems to be such miserable creatures which are the portrayal of what you and I fear and hope, what we lack or hide, the idea and the strength to unveil what makes us or destroys us.
So, I was compelled to write my first post of December about these unpublished mysteries, how I respond to them. I want to express the feelings I had when I saw these nets.
They seems to have mysteries that even we are unaware of yet go on to finding answers we may never, only to satisfy what yearns the human mind .They seems to have a very strong association with the missing person and the identities that you and I have lost, a soul perhaps because they themselves goes through the same process of “lost and found”. These nets are once lost in the sea, remain there for years and then might be found by someone who again brings them with him, may be repair or recycle them in any way and the cycle continues… And some of them remain forgotten like the missing persons who have been lost for the past few years and we still don’t know where they are or will they ever come back?
They are a sorrow filled stimulus of what we are persistently undergoing. They showcase the absence present within them. The Hypnagogic ambiance of these nets ironically engages me in a more relatable manner, clustering the seen memories to evoke what dreads and concerns us. It seems to devour what lies in every beings heart, the despair of the absence of an identity. Its only human nature to fear, one which makes us veil what we know. What do we know? Will we ever know enough?
I essence the diminishing component and would like to extend my concerns towards the extensions of decomposition of those lost identities. I am compounding these found objects to render the sense of existence within misplaced, evoking many to cringe.
“Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.”
Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
Passionate suspicion? Unaccountable and unaccounted queries that we all want the justification to, yet what can ever justify or rationalize the tactility of losing a character we could ever define so greatly, even more than our individuality? It includes mystery, violence, beauty, hope, fear, all summed up in these strange creatures. These nets are the portrayal of who once existed. The chaos that lies in our minds is something that we cannot forgo, and the one that keeps on building and burdening the souls of the lost.
These nets do not simply remind me the tragedies that we have become a part of but rather interprets the negative anonymous charms we are left with their departing. They hypocrite the phenomena and bury them under, It is you and I that are left with metaphorical alluring and eventually yearn for glimpses of what once was. What can’t be cured, must be endured.
I had always known the sky was full of secrecies, but not until now had I realized how occupied of them the earth is. Devour what we may know, to avoid the for saken distress that may come with. It is the hush-hush of the world that all things exist and do not die, but withdraw a little from sight and afterwards return yet again. The dead fish being trapped in one of the nets metaphorically says that “once something had existed and is now amongst these remembering’s”. This Familiarity Effect, where we prefer that which is familiar to us, makes loss more difficult, and if we mislay what we are by this time familiar with, we have to go through the spiteful process of getting acquainted with unfamiliar things. The phenomena in the pattern of searching, one loses itself.
Being inspired from that fish skeleton being trapped in those ghost nets, I painted a ray of dead fish emerging from the head of an anonymous identity and heading towards a mystical river, surrounded by rustic textured setting.
Dead fish are symbolic of a loss of power or wealth by an individual thus we are only as strong as we think we are, unaware of the wilderness of sadness that will carry our burden. The deteriorating of the absent identities is enough for us to create thoughtful speculations of what the future may behold for us. There is and never will be any loss greater than the one of losing the one. Our psychological mechanisms make us dread over the pain, yet with time the similar tends to heal and rectify us in a much bizarre manner. The pain becomes a memory and what we are left with are the illusory images and precedents of what we once grieved over, and soon noises are no more noises. Does the human mind make it fair? For us to heal with time? Will we ever heal for that matter? Should we even heal?
The amalgamation of these nostalgic memories and spaces no matter how vague and absurd they may seem is something which no one deny, neither is the ironic understanding one tends to develop by standing in front of these nets.
In the time and age with all we are witnessing, it has become dreadful and heartbreaking to bare the losses, even though they may not be ours- so to speak. The expectations we have about our future comfort and cement our emotional reaction to forfeiture. . One cannot help but be in reverence when he envisages the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous arrangement of reality.
“Qui craint de souffir, il souffre deja de ce qu’ill craint”
A French proverb that perhaps I have understood long before even I knew what suffering really meant. “He who fears suffering is already suffering that which he fears’’.