Untitled (this is not a circle) 2015
When I think about my perception, I embrace its negative space, the impossibility for me to perceive the world as I used to before my car accident. The gap between what I see or don’t see, the transitional phenomena between the emotional body and external reality, that reoccurred the first time I was able to align my vision after the car accident. I didn’t have the orbit of my left eye reconstructed until the third surgery. My eye was still adjusting to its new space during the months of rehabilitation following the accident. I talked to “Him” (because in Spanish “eye” is gendered male) to encourage him while I practiced coordination, accuracy, accommodation, and mobility exercises to synch the vision of both eyes. I sat in a chair for eight hours a day waiting for something to happen. My double vision was so irregular in near and far distances that I was losing the dimensionality of objects. My brain had enough memory to supply information, but the physicality of objects was vanishing. At the same time, any movement that I was able to do with my fragmented eye muscle was liberating, albeit painful, like peeling duct tape off of flesh.
And all of a sudden it happened. I was waiting with my sister at the Atocha train station in Madrid, and without any warning, without any expectation I found it. In a tiny spot, a foot away from me, 15º up from my nose, my vision melded. I started to dance making circles around my sister and to move my head back and forth to locate this little dot of synchronicity; as I recreated in the video performance Untitled (this is not a circle). The impossibility and the desire to see transformed into an alchemical freedom, into an unphysical detachment. It was a dizzying moment contained by a certain impossible possibility of seeing the unseen: a tingling, a thrill, and a shocking tremble.
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