Thursday 4 July 2019
Jasmina Sermijn & Robert van Hennik
Closer to you. A polyphony of voices around the effects of psychiatric diagnoses.
‘In arts the purpose lies not in understanding or interpretation, but rather in affecting the nerves: art is sensation and nothing else, it acts immediately upon the flesh, rather than through the intermediary of the brain which is closer to the bone.’ (Gilles Deleuze)
In the video project Closer to you a woman tells to her son how the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder affected & imprisoned her for years and how she tries to escape that imprisonment. Her story shows how it feels, as a Deleuzian ‘dividu’, to get stuck into the rigid unity of a centralised story and how difficult it is to create lines of flights to others territories of living.
For the project A Polyphony of Voices we invite outsider witnesses to watch the video Closer to you and to share with us how the story of this woman ‘affects their nerves’. This results in a polyphonic interplay of different voices, all of them talking & reflecting about possible effects of being diagnosed. The combination between image, voice and music creates an intense visual and auditory game that carries away the spectator and acts immediately upon the flesh.
The video project Closer to you is co-created by Patricia Goemaere & Jasmina Sermijn. The project A Polyphony of Voices is hosted by Jasmina Sermijn & Robert Van Hennik.