The Poetics of Space – Vestoj http://vestoj.com The Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion Thu, 04 May 2023 05:45:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5 Vestoj x VNIVRS: Forces in Art, Theatre and Fashion http://vestoj.com/vestoj-x-vnivrs-forces-in-art-theatre-and-fashion-explosions/ Thu, 19 Dec 2013 22:51:29 +0000 http://www.vestoj.com/current/?p=2271 WATER – IN ITS VAST eternity – reaches the infinite within us, connecting the single entity into a whole. One drop within a body of water expands to the entirety of the sea; birth, flooding, drowning. Life and death are held within the liquid mass of water, and can deliver us back to the beginning of it all. Through water, we are held within ourselves, and we project our own image onto it. We find ourselves seduced by the sub-conscious dream, only here does our body allow us to meditate on our void; shifting attention from the outside world and creating a space for healing, transformation and rebirth. The immersive qualities of the earthly elements embody and saturate us wholly.

‘The external spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold’1 wrote the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. To take notice of our perceptions, let them rush in, blow over us, is a post-modern ritual, replacing ancient and religious modes of delivery: cleansing and healing. In consuming a spectacle, our senses are engaged. In this experience, we project our image, suspending it in space, meditating on our own void. In search of answers, we turn to spectacles that captivate our senses: art, theatre, fashion and cinema.

Bill Viola, ‘The Crossing’, video/sound installation, photograph by David Heald, 1996.
Alexander McQueen, autumn/winter, 2004.

 

 

‘Like the sea, it reveals the depths of being within us.’

– Philippe Diolé2

 

 

Random International, ‘Rain Room’, 2012.

 

 

Fendi, spring/summer, 2014.

 

 

‘When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came. “but then again, I’m no Nostradamus…”’

– Alexander McQueen3

 

 

 

Alexander McQueen, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, spring/summer, 2010.

‘Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.’

– Hiroshi Sugimoto4 

Christian Dior, Cruise, 2014, photograph courtesy of Bureau Betak.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, ‘Seascapes’, 2006, installation view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, US.

‘Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely and eternally agreeable? Because the sea presents at once the idea of immensity and movement.’

– Charles Baudelaire5

Bill Viola, ‘The Messenger’, 1986.
Peter Sellars’ production of Richard Wagner’s, ‘Tristan und Isolde’, 2004, installation view at Opéra National de Paris, featuring a video by Bill Viola.

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.


  1. G Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, p. 182. 

  2. P Diolé, The Most Beautiful Desert of All, Jonathan Cape, London, 1959, p. 14 

  3. http://www.alexandermcqueen.com/experience/en/alexandermcqueen/archive/?years=2010#id_article=260 

  4. http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/seascape.html 

  5. C Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, Dover Publications, New York, 2006, p. 90 

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Vestoj x VNIVRS: Forces in Art, Theatre and Fashion http://vestoj.com/vestoj-x-vnivrs-forces-in-art-theatre-and-fashion-storm/ Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:26:05 +0000 http://www.vestoj.com/current/?p=1985 NATURE CONTINUES TO FASCINATE us: we observe in awe from a distance its potential for violence and physicality. Impressed and over-powered by fear and respect for this great and unknown, we try to imitate and re-create these forces, or domesticate them to a scale we can control. In beholding spectacles of nature, we have an intuitive reaction to that which can conquer us, and it will forever have this potential.

Storm insists on change as an element of movement, its force and eternal mission derives destruction from flow. When it crosses us, its urge of movement requires an abandonment of our old thoughts and actions. We move where the wind blows us. In this fight for our own existence, we adopt the characteristics and patterns of movement of such forces of nature. Subjects move with the order of nature, and it will forever hold this power over us.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave, (wood block print), early 1820s.
JMW Turner, ‘Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth’, 1842.

‘It is the principle of “correspondences” to receive the immensity of the world, which they transform into intensity of our intimate being’

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994. 

Atelier Brueckner, ‘Magic Box’, State Grid Pavilion, EXPO Shanghai, Better City – Better Life, photography by Roland Halbe, 2010.
Alexander McQueen, autumn/winter 2003 ‘Scanners’.

‘Art imitates nature, and it is the part of the same discipline to know the form and the matter up to a point.’

R P Hardie and R K Gaye from Physica in The Works of Aristotle, 1930.

Tokujin Yoshioka, ‘The Snow’, installation view at Mori Art Museum, 2010.
‘Solo Echo’, 2012, Nederlands Dans Theater.
Lacoste autumn/winter 2012, photography by Yannis Vlamos.
John Galliano, autumn/winter 2009.

 ‘Oh, and there’s Night, there’s Night, when wind full of cosmic space

Fling that emptiness out of your arms

into the space we breathe – maybe that the birds

will feel the extended air in a more fervent flight’ 

Rainer Maria Rilke, the first elegy in Duino Elegies, 1930.

Storm over Alaska, Satellite image from NASA, 2011.
‘Symphony in D Minor’, Patrick Gallagher and Chris Klapper, 2012.

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

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